As your business grows, your IT infrastructure grows more complex. Creating user accounts, managing access rights, and securing the data while allowing effective access to the applications your business depends on becomes a challenge.
The concept of single sign-on (SSO) has gained popularity in recent years as businesses look for ways to streamline their internal processes to provide employees, partners and customers with an easier way to do business, as well as to stay compliant with regulations mandating tighter controls for information access.
What it can do for you
- Lower management costs: by storing all the user authentication details in an LDAP directory and enabling SSO you can substantially reduce the cost of identity management, user provisioning, application access control and user authentication;
- Improve productivity: SSO is the foundation for the integration of user account management functions for the various systems in your organization;
- Reduce support costs: Studies show that in the absence of SSO, more then 30% of the help desk calls concern a loss of identifier or password;
- Increase security: SSO limits the usage of trivial, easy to remember passwords. Moreover, it significantly reduces the need to re-enter the password, decreasing the risk of accidentally revealing it.
How it works
- Linux and Windows clients authenticate against a central Linux or Active Directory server, using the industry standard Kerberos protocol;
- The central Kerberos server issues a security token to the client, which can later be used to gain access to various other resources, such as file servers or business applications;
- The Kerberos protocol is encrypted, allowing the authentication to function securely over unencrypted links;
- Legacy applications can be modified to support the Kerberos protocol, and take part in the single sign-on process;
- We can help you instrument your business applications to take full advantage of your single sign-on infrastructure.