Friday, May 20, 2011

Enterprise Single Sign On

I recently attended the Interop Las Vegas trade show and one of the most asked about products we offer was our Enterprise Single Sign On Manager.. One of the things I noticed was that there seem to be a lot of different takes on want companies are looking for in this arena.

The Tools4eversolution has been on the market for a couple of years now and, as of late, has been gaining a lot of traction in the market. Some of our recent deployments include a City Government in Florida, an automobile dealer, an insurance company, a division of the Federal Courts, a charter school and a bank – quite a representation of the types of organizations looking to deploy SSO functionality.

The Tools4ever implementation of SSO utilizes Active Directory as the authoritative source for Password Management. An end user will log into AD and provide their credentials one time for every other application they are authorized to use. It does not matter if it is a web page, standard Windows app, mainframe session or Citrix desktop. After that, our E-SSOM solution remembers the credentials and securely provides them as required. No more sticky notes with dozens of user names and password on the side of the monitor. No more calls to the help desk to reset a password for a specific application. One secure, complex password will, in essence, provide access to any authorized application.

The issue of security often arises with SSO implementations as well. What if someone hacks that one password, they know have access to everything! The common item we see here is the use of simple passwords to make them easier to remember, not enforcing regular password changes and the inevitable sticky notes! With SSO, you can make the one password more complex and enforce a regular change, making this aspect even more secure. Further, our SSO solution can randomly reset password to applications so by disabling the SSO profile, you revoke access to everything!

To learn more about Tools4ever and our Identity and Password management solutions, please visit our website.