Contents
One of the best things the entire enterprise world has done in the past couple of years is the move from on-premise infrastructure to a cloud one. The cloud just offers so many advantages, from improved security to the ability to scale operations easily, to making everything more useful in general. And even more, enterprises are now coming to this realization and making the move.
But with that in mind, moving to the cloud also requires you to start using various apps and services, and each one of them in an enterprise environment will ask your employees to sign in. Do you know how many sets of credentials that each employee needs to remember? Well, not with something like the Shibboleth service provider which gets you a single sign-on solution that your enterprise will love. And here’s why.
First of All – What is a Single Sign-On Solution?
An SSO provider will basically create an authentication process where each employee can log on to applications and touchpoints within your enterprise, by using just a single set of credentials. Most of them, like Shibboleth which we mentioned above, will work regardless of the technology or platform you’re using, and it’ll improve on a few critical aspects.
User Experience
It’s not just customers that hate difficult sign-up and log-in processes – employees hate them, too. And with modern apps trying to be different, far too many of them are actually overcomplicating things with no need, making for a difficult user experience. When it comes to an enterprise situation, you have more than one app, and there’s the risk of your employees needing to deal with a difficult user experience with all of them.
To put things into perspective, do you know how many potential online shoppers give up on buying the things they have in their cart just because the sign-up process is too difficult? You don’t want the same thing happening within your company, but an SSO solution can deal with that. If an employee or client uses one of your apps, they can now log on to all of them without any problems, and this results in a much more streamlined user experience.
Security
An incredibly important talking point when it comes to SSO, it’s worth mentioning that single sign-on solutions offer greatly improved security. Many people, understandably, ask how could one set of credentials be more secure than having multiple? And while this is a very valid question, the answer is much simpler than you think.
Password fatigue is something that you can fight, but you won’t be able to completely deal with it. Well, unless you just use a single password. And when you do that, you can make that single password as complex as you want. Add uppercase letters, add lowercase letters, add numbers and symbols – you can do whatever you want as long as you remember the password. The fact that it’s just one to remember makes you want to go for a more complicated one and adds quite a lot of security. And that’s the entire point.
If you want, you can even combine it with a two-factor authentication solution, which further sweetens the pot and reduces the chances of someone getting unauthorized access, well, zero. Good password management and stable internet to avoid internet outages are the most important aspects of good security when launching a new enterprise.
Productivity
Your enterprise probably has a tech support team that deals with employees’ and customers’ issues, right? Here’s a thing for you to do – ask them what the most common request they get from both employees and customers. We’re willing to bet it’s going to be “Please reset my password”, and you probably saw that coming, too. The point is, your tech support team probably wastes too much time dealing with this.
Well, a single sign-on solution means your employees and customers only have a single password to remember, so your team won’t be wasting time dealing with these requests, and instead, they’ll be able to attend to more pressing issues that keep your enterprise running.
Software Adoption
Has it ever happened to you that you find an app that you know would make things go smoother and faster, but it’s just too much work to have everyone sign up for it? Yeah, software adoption can be especially tricky when we’re talking about a large-scale enterprise with hundreds or thousands of employees.
But a quality SSO solution won’t only make sure that it’s easy to integrate with pre-existing apps, but it’ll also solve any issues you might have with apps you’d like to integrate down the line, which deals with software adoption perfectly. It’s something that you should be considering, especially when you have so many useful apps at your disposal that can boost your income and make your life easier. And it’s an opportunity that you should be jumping on as soon as possible.
