More than one is usually a good thing. More french fries, more vacation days, more friends. More usernames and passwords? Not so much.
Organizations are increasingly turning to single sign-on (SSO) to lessen the burden of employees needing to remember endless usernames and passwords to access all the applications, websites and data to do their daily jobs. SSO provides for more efficiency, security and compliance and less risk and user frustration.
Single Sign-on Saves Time
How many times on your personal computer have you had to track down your username and password for a given application? How much time have you wasted? How many times have you had to reset your credentials, only to forget them the next time you accessed the application? If it’s frustrating on a personal level, it’s unproductive and not at all cost-effective in an organizational setting.
Users benefit when employers implement SSO portals by being able to access their applications with just one set of credentials, not multiple. This one-click access to needed resources delivers obvious time-saving advantages.
SSO Helps IT Staff Smile
In addition to users getting frustrated when they need to recall different passwords, IT staff have to spend an inordinate amount of time resetting credentials, taking time away from more critical, high-level tasks.
IT pros cringe at the many bad password habits users have developed, like writing them down on a sticky note attached to a monitor for all to see, repeating passwords for years and years, or using commonly used, easily detected passwords. Single sign-on protocols help enforce strong password policies.
SSO Sounds Great. What’s the Catch?
If not protected appropriately, with SSO in place, a hacker would only need to grab access to one set of credentials to gain access to all of a user’s information. How can organizations adopting SSO protect against this risk?
- Encryption: File transfer protocols, like FTP and HTTP, use clear text format to send credentials without encryption. Secure file transfer can eliminate this immediate risk.
- Authentication: With managed file transfer (MFT) in place, multi-factor authentication is supported for greater protection when logging into the SSO portal. In addition, with GoAnywhere MFT, you can tailor the level of access and authentication granted for each user in your organization. Administrator and web user authentication via single sign-on is granted and can be set to force users to authenticate with an SSO, should they try logging in directly to an application.
- Customized user access: GoAnywhere’s easy-to-use dashboard-style interface allows for quick customization of user access.
- Secure email: With GoAnywhere, when a user sends files to recipients, the files are first routed to the server GoAnywhere is installed on and are automatically encrypted. A secure link is then sent to recipients to download them. As GoAnywhere enables SSO securely over an HTTPS connection, there is no need to have senders create credentials for their recipients. Keeping email file transfers simple, but secure, helps your users stop using other, less secure file sharing methods.
So, grab that extra french fry, take that additional vacation day, but ditch those multiple credentials with a secure, customizable way to transfer your files enabled with and supportive of single sign-on.
