What is Single Sign-On about?

Let’s admit it. We hate filling out registration forms in the real world. We hate online registration in the digital world. We have time to go through such a boring phase, right? But, websites don’t get it. They still make you create a unique username and password for that website.

Let’s pick a real-time example.

You don’t have to change your birth certificate or driver's license for each street, city, or country you enter, right? You can get authenticated by showing a single license or birth certificate. Now imagine how cool it would be if it is implemented in the online realm too. Thanks to the single sign-on. You don’t have to login or register for each web property.

What is single sign-on, or SSO?

SSO offers a single digital identity for several domains. Of course, you have to sign in a register for one time. In today's world, you can escape it, but the best part is you need to do it just once. If there’s a group of applications on domains connected with each other, you just have to register or sign in just once.

Enterprise single sign-on provides one-click access to several applications and helps you to manage passwords. With SSO clients over each terminal, you don’t have to enter your username and password every time you need to gain access. Here users can interact easily with mobile apps or websites and gain access to applications on domains.

In a nutshell single sign-on helps customers to gain access to several applications or websites with just one click of identity authentication.

How is it possible?

SSO is made possible by centralizing the process of authentication and identity provision. Let’s say, an organization got three or four websites. If you want to gain access to one of the websites, you should be signed in already. This is possible by creating a separate session for you during your single sign-in. Session information needs to be shared by other website domains so that you don’t have to go through the tedious registration or the sign-in process.

There’s a glitch here! Most browsers don’t store cookies and never allow sharing session info due to the same-origin policy.

Thanks to Multipass, JSON Web token and SAML session information can be easily shared to check if you are already logged in to a related website domain or app.

Features of SSO

Centralized mechanism

Now storing activity information and credentials of customers is easy due to the centralization mechanism offered by single sign-on. A single sign-on helps businesses to have a detailed insight about each customer across different domains of properties.

Amazing user experience

Your customers are less likely to bounce back since there is no login page for each app on our website. This can boost up conversions and ROI for your business.

Centralized analysis

Be it preparing centralized analysis or reporting, single sign-on can be helpful for businesses to keep a track of customer profiles.

Single sign-on can be an amazing addition to your IAM if businesses can leverage their true potential.

Also published at https://gururajswamy.medium.com/how-does-single-sign-on-work-is-it-helpful-for-businesses-3aedf707dfcd