What Is An SSO ID and Why Is It Important
Every day internet users interact with numerous online services including government websites, corporate applications, education systems, and other business services. Keeping track of usernames and passwords for all these services can be a cumbersome and problematic task. This is where Single Sign-On (SSO) IDs become useful.
Single Sign-On IDs (SSO IDs) serve the purpose of providing a unique credential that is used to enter a variety of services. An SSO ID can authenticate a user to multiple systems. After authentication, the user can navigate through multiple applications without the need to enter credentials again. This feature of Single Sign-On IDs is user friendly and is a time saver.
How Does An SSO ID Work?
When a user tries to log into a connected service using SSO ID, the service’s authentication system communicates with a central Identity Provider (IdP) for identity confirmation. After confirmation, the IdP creates a login token that is securely stored. This token is used to access all other connected services without the need to log into each of them. This is done without the user’s awareness.
Advantages of employing SSO ID
By far the greatest benefit of SSO ID is the convenience it brings to the user. They don’t have to remember as many passwords, meaning there is less logging in frustration. From a security viewpoint, SSO does minimizes bad passwords policies since users have less credentials to manage.
For SSO as it relates to Companies, there are less expenses from IT. The amount of requests for password resets becomes less and user access to a system can be done by a single administrator. In this way, they can have access to all of the systems and it can be done quickly if they lose access. This becomes easier for the company to manage and also for compliance management.
What are the most common usage cases for Single Sign-On ID?
Government services, corporate, university, and many cloud-based systems utilize SSO ID. SSO ID has many variations of digital identity systems. The main goal is single access to multiple services in a system for the citizen, employee, or student.
SSO ID improves user experience and drives demand for systems to be more secure, however, unmitigated SSO user experience can be a vector for bad systems. Security becomes a concern. Passwords have to be strong. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) must be used, and identity providers must be secure. When done correctly, SSO may be more secure than the previous multiple log ins.
Conclusion
With SSO ID systems, users obtain an easy to access digital ID management system. As digital systems are created more and more, digital systems will not be able to function without SSO.
