Single Sign-on is a solution to help to reduce the complexity and cost of managing your users’ access to services that use industry standards to provide a single sign-on experience for your users. It is a service hosted in the Micro Focus Software as a Service (SaaS) environment and can securely connect to your existing systems.
Single Sign-on provides secure access for the users in your organization to any application, resource, or service that supports single sign-on. Using industry standards such as Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) and OAuth you create a two-way, trusted connection between Single Sign-on and the external application, resource, or service. The two-way, trusted connection is a federated connection that allows the users to have a single sign-on experience with these trusted resources.
As an organization, you spend a lot of time and resources ensuring that your users have access to the applications required to perform their jobs. Without a single sign-on solution, the users face a complex environment to be able to access and use the applications or resources required to complete their jobs. The following figure depicts the log-in experience from a user’s point of view.
Figure 1-1 Log-in Experience for a User without Single Sign-on
The user must obtain and remember a separate user name and password for each application. This type of experience:
Causes confusion for the user.
Generates many support calls because of forgotten passwords and IDs.
Causes users to write down passwords and IDs to be able to log in or access the applications and resources they need.
Creates a security issue because it tempts the users to write down their passwords and IDs.
Requires many hours of managing the user’s access and authentication tokens to the different systems.
Single Sign-on provides a solution that allows you to configure the single sign-on experience for your users once per application. It allows to you create a secure, federated connection between your organization’s systems and the applications or resource the users need to access. After you have Single Sign-on configured for the different applications or resources, the user’s log-in experience is much simpler. The following figure shows this experience from the user’s point of view.
Figure 1-2 Log-in Experience for a User with Single Sign-on
Single Sign-on simplifies the user’s log-in experience and it also reduces the administrative overhead of distributing multiple authentication tokens to the users. Single Sign-on:
Simplifies the user’s log-in experience by providing one password and ID for the different single sign-on enabled applications or resources.
Reduces the number of support calls because of forgotten passwords and IDs.
Reduces the temptation of users writing down their passwords and IDs to access the applications and resources that they need.
Minimizes the security issue of users writing down their passwords and IDs because they need to remember only one password and user ID.
Reduces the administrative overhead of granting authentication tokens to each user to access each application and resource.