Passwords are SSO last season

This issue of "access amnesia" has the potential to be furthermore exacerbated as businesses increasingly look to cloud services just as Google Apps for email and document sharing. Google Apps, especially Gmail, are a popular option for organisations making their first foray into cloud-based services. During the cost advantages of this model are compelling, businesses do not want to create a whole new set of accounts for their employees in the cloud, or force their employees to remember more new, complex passwords.

Internet single sign-on has been around for a during, nevertheless the increased need to access a wide variety of internal and externally hosted business applications means it has come into its own. It enables users to continue to use their own local accounts, logging into their computers as normal, but at that time seamlessly log into the cloud services. In doing so, the user experiences a continuous link from the corporate system, just as their Windows login, into the cloud services, just as email.

As more and more businesses look to the cloud for service provisioning, SSO should sound the death knell for passwords as we know them, and increasingly become the must-have solution for secure and seamless access from both inside and outside a company’s boundaries.