On-premise infrastructure is so yesterday – it’s not something you should keep investing in as an enterprise, and it’s not something you want to have to drag you down. Instead, cloud infrastructure offers improved security, scalability, and overall usefulness, and many enterprises are slowly coming to the realization that it’s something they should strongly consider.

That being said, with the cloud you have various applications and touchpoints you need to access, and having each employee have a set of credentials for each can easily get out of control. If you don’t want your IT department struggling with that, you need to be looking at enterprise single sign on solutions. Let’s take a closer look at what they are and what they bring to the table.

What’s a Single Sign-On Solution?

An SSO is an authentication process that lets people log on to multiple touchpoints and applications within an enterprise with a single set of credentials that works for all of them. When you have the right implementation (and solution), it won’t matter what kind of platform or technology you’re using – it’ll work with everything. And it improves on a few key aspects within the enterprise.

Security

This is arguably one of the main reasons why enterprises consider an SSO solution – improved security. Now, there is an obvious downside with people using a single set of credentials for logging in – someone getting access to that one set could potentially get access to all of the enterprise’s apps and websites. And in theory, this is very much true.

But in practice, if a user only has a single password to remember, they aren’t dealing with password fatigue and can easily afford to create a password that’s incredibly complex. You’ll find yourself mixing up lowercase and UppErCAse letters, adding numb3rs and $ymbols, and overall making the password practically impossible to guess. And that’s a reasonable approach, but not one that’s possible when you need to have ten passwords and not just one.

And if this still hasn’t convinced you, most quality SSO solutions allow you to combine them with two-factor authentication, so you can add even more security to the logins and prevent unauthorized access! SSO solutions and stable internet to prevent internet outages are two most important factors that enable security and support great productivity. 

Streamlined User Experience

It seems that many companies underestimate just how much of an impact a difficult sign-up or log-in procedure can have on a user’s decision to stick with an app or switch to another one. If your users don’t need to bother with remembering multiple passwords and can instead just use the apps, they aren’t wasting time and this, in turn, makes everything work great.

Here’s an example – did you know that millions of customers of websites like Amazon or eBay or other similar web stores abandon their carts because there isn’t a quick and efficient log-in process? That’s far too many, and it’s something that can be avoided with an SSO. Clients that use some of your other apps can now log on to all of them, and they won’t need to remember multiple passwords or reset them because they’ve forgotten.

Improved Software Adoption

This is a direct consequence of the streamlined user experience, but it reflects internally rather than with your customers. Has it ever happened that you wanted to implement an app in your enterprise’s workflow, but couldn’t because you figured out you’d need to spend weeks training each employee how to sign up and log on? If the answer is “yes”, you’re not the only one, but it’s something you need to deal with because it impacts your software adoption rate.

This is even worse in today’s business landscape where you have an app for basically anything you might think of, and many of those things could possibly make things easier or boost your ROI. Having an SSO solution that you can implement with most such apps allows you to push them in the workflow without overthinking and enjoy the benefits without your employees getting pissed because they can’t get it right.

Boosted Productivity

Last but certainly not least, here’s a question you should ask your tech support team: what’s the question you get most often? Want to bet the answer will be someone forgetting their password? And to make matters worse, it happens almost daily, costing your tech support team (and the one who forgot the password) valuable time that they could be spending doing more important things.

With SSO, that’s a thing of the past, because they only have a single password to remember, and they probably won’t forget it anytime soon. It’s technology – it should be making our lives easier, not more difficult and time-consuming, and that’s exactly the problem SSO aims to solve, while also dealing with a few other problems along the way that makes things better.