Category: Single Sign-on

What does SSO (Single Sign-On) mean and How It Works in Enterprise Environments

Every day, employees face dozens of login screens. Each one demands a password, and each one slows them down. Single sign-on, or SSO, changes that. It lets users log in once and move freely across multiple applications. We are often asked, “What is single sign-on?” And this is important to understand, because understanding how SSO works means recognizing a shift – from scattered credentials to unified access. In enterprise environments, this simple idea transforms security and productivity alike.

Tired of multiple logins? Akku’s SSO/IDP offers one-click access to all your apps – secure, efficient, and enterprise-ready.

Single Sign-on (SSO) Meaning: One Login, Multiple Benefits

Let’s begin with the meaning of SSO. The full form of SSO is Single Sign-On. At face value, it’s a convenience tool. Log in once and you’re in to everything. But its essence is deeper. SSO is not just about reducing logins. It’s about streamlining identity, about turning chaos into clarity.

So, what is SSO? What is single sign-on? It’s the idea that authentication should be unified. You prove your identity once, securely, and gain access to multiple systems. Think of it as a backstage pass. Instead of knocking at every door, you’re granted a badge. That badge, cryptographically signed and verified, opens every room you’re authorized to enter.

How Does SSO Work? – A Unified Login Solution Explained

The Core Components Behind SSO

To understand how SSO works, imagine an office building. You enter through the main door and show your ID at reception. After that, you walk freely between departments. That’s the idea behind SSO integration.

Step-by-Step SSO Authentication Flow

Here is a step-by-step overview of the SSO authentication process:

  • The user requests access to a protected application.
  • The application redirects the user to an identity provider.
  • The identity provider checks for an active authentication session.
  • If none exists, the user is prompted to enter credentials.
  • After verification, the identity provider issues a secure token.
  • The token returns to the application, which validates it and grants access.

This process happens almost instantly. Technologies like SAML, OAuth, and OpenID Connect make sure identity information moves safely and reliably. These protocols build the trust that modern systems depend on.

If you’re considering how to approach SSO implementation, the answer lies in building trust between systems, leveraging token-based communication, and ensuring encrypted interactions between identity and service providers.

Common SSO Protocols

The widely adopted protocols supporting SSO include

  • SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language): Common in enterprise environments.
  • OAuth: Designed for authorizing third-party access without sharing passwords.
  • OpenID Connect: Built on OAuth for richer identity information and enhanced user experience.

Why Do Enterprises Need SSO Today?

Increased Productivity Through Reduced Login Fatigue

Imagine an employee who needs to check Salesforce, Zoom, Jira, and Notion – all before their first coffee. Without SSO, that’s four logins. With it, just one. That’s time saved. Focus preserved. And that mental energy is redirected toward work that matters.

Improved Security (No Password Reuse, Better Authentication)

Having many passwords often leads to poor security. Users tend to reuse passwords, write them down, or choose weak ones. With SSO, there is only one password to protect. And it’s easier to remember one strong password than multiple weak ones.

Better It Efficiency (Centralized Control And Fewer Reset Requests)

Ask any IT admin what the most common ticket is. Password resets. SSO drastically reduces these. With SSO integration, access becomes a switchboard. IT can turn permissions on or off, audit usage, and streamline offboarding – all from a central dashboard.

Support For Hybrid/Remote Workforces

Whether an employee logs in from the office, their home, or a café, SSO applications deliver a consistent experience. That’s the power of centralized identity. Location no longer dictates access. Trust does.

Single Sign-On (SSO) Applications & Examples

Consider this single sign-on example: a new hire joins your company. On day one, they sign in with their corporate credentials. Instantly, they’re in Gmail, Slack, Trello, and the company wiki. They don’t need to ping IT. They don’t need setup guides. They just start.

That’s the magic of SSO. It’s invisible when it works. And indispensable once adopted. Here are some more examples…

Finance: One Login, Instant Access

A junior analyst walks into the office on day one. She logs in with Akku SSO. Instantly, she’s inside the trading platform, the reporting dashboard, and the compliance portal. No waiting. No IT calls. In a business where milliseconds cost millions, this isn’t convenience – it’s strategy.

Healthcare: Saving Time to Save Lives

A doctor moves between patients, tablets in hand. With a single sign-on, she pulls up scans, lab results, and schedules without breaking stride. Akku SSO makes it seamless. The fewer seconds spent logging in, the more time she has to do what matters – care for people.

IT: Build and Deploy Faster

An engineer flips between Jira, GitHub, and AWS. With Akku SSO, it’s one login for everything. No sticky notes, no reset links. Workflows. Security holds. Akku doesn’t just streamline – it gives IT what it always wanted: control without compromise.

Akku SSO: Enterprise-Grade Access Control Made Simple

For enterprises navigating the complexities of modern identity, Akku delivers more than just a login solution. It provides a strategic advantage. As one of the leading SSO providers, Akku offers a single sign-on service built for both scale and simplicity.

Whether you’re starting fresh or integrating into a legacy system, Akku’s SSO implementation tools make the transition seamless. Its platform works across cloud and on-premise environments, giving IT teams control and users freedom.

If you’re ready to simplify access and strengthen security, Akku is the SSO application partner you’ve been looking for.

Enterprise-Grade Security Starts Here – Try Akku SSO/IDP for Smarter Access Control.

Catch up on the latest trends and updates by exploring our informative and engaging blog section.

Passwordless Authentication 101: What it is, How you can adopt it, and Why it’s the future

To stick with passwords or to go passwordless is a million-dollar cyber security question. Resetting, remembering, and changing passwords regularly is not only frustrating but puts critical information at risk. But at the same time, have we reached a point where we can realistically remove passwords entirely from our authentication processes?

The drawbacks of passwords

Strong passwords are difficult to remember, and weak passwords are too easy to hack. Additionally, overuse of the same passwords across multiple platforms can result in breaches during credential stuffing attacks.

According to a report from LastPass, weekly time spent managing users’ passwords and login information has increased 25% since 2019. The report also says that 85% of employees agree that their organization should reduce the number of passwords required to be used daily. And according to Verizon data, 81% of data breaches involve weak, default, or stolen passwords.

What is Passwordless Authentication?

Passwordless authentication is user-friendly and secure and brings to the table reduced IT costs by eliminating password-related risks, increased productivity as employees save time remembering or updating passwords, and stronger security. In short, passwordless authentication is both convenient and secure.

Passwordless authentication relies on the same principles as digital certificates, on public and private keys. Think of the public key as the padlock and the private key as the key that unlocks it. With digital certificates, there is only one key for the padlock and only one padlock for the key. For passwordless authentication, a cryptographic key pairs with a private and a public key. A user wishing to create a secure account uses a mobile app to generate a public-private key pair, where the public key is provided to the system, and the private key is accessed from the user’s local device using an authentication factor such as an OTP. 

Here are some ways you can go passwordless

  • Single Sign-on or SSO
    It simplifies managing access and provides employees an easy and secure way to log in. Also, it allows IT to provision or deprovision access as needed. However, while SSO reduces the number of passwords required, it often demands a single password to access all applications.
  • Biometrics
    Fingerprints, face, iris, voice, and other biometric parameters are used as they are considered more challenging to hack than alphanumeric codes. They are also convenient to use, as they cannot be misplaced, stolen or forgotten.
  • Hard tokens
    They allow access to software after verification with a physical device.
  • OTPs
    Users are asked to input the code sent to them via email or SMS. OTPs provide an additional layer to security and are more secure than static passwords. OTPs are often used as a second layer of authentication, but can even replace static passwords.
  • Private keys
    An alphanumeric string is processed through an algorithm, to encrypt or decrypt data.
  • Magic Links
    Users enter their email address in a form, and then an email is sent with a login link.
  • Push Notifications
    Users receive a push notification on their mobile devices through a dedicated authenticator app for identity verification.

Passwordless authentication methods are compatible across most devices and systems. Plus, they’re virtually impervious to phishing and other common cyberattacks.

So, is passwordless authentication the future?

Passwordless methods offer both a more secure and a more convenient way to authenticate users. So the simple answer is, yes, they are the future.

However, considering how ubiquitous passwords are today, they certainly aren’t going to disappear overnight. So until passwordless methods gain in popularity, it’s important to continue to do all you can to ensure strong passwords to secure your applications and data.

Whether you are ready to take the leap to passwordless, or are looking for a way to make your password based authentication more secure, Akku can help you enhance security and productivity across your environment. Talk to us today to see how we can help.

 

A malicious user gaining access to your apps can be catastrophic. Here’s how a secure SSO could help.

In any enterprise, it is a given that employees will come and go, and many will switch roles within the organization as well. At the same time, the same is true for the applications that the company uses – new apps will be deployed, old ones will be retired, and changes are constant.

What this means is a continuous churn – in identity management for users, and service providers, by means of the SaaS applications in use. Ensuring data and app security across the organization depends heavily on ensuring secure communication between your identity provider and service providers.

Deploying a robust Single Sign-On (SSO) solution represents the best answer to this challenge. An SSO allows an enterprise to manage the identities of employees in one place, and delegate access and privileges from there.

Most SaaS providers support SSO integration as it is the most efficient route to centralized identity and access management. The SSO authentication method also enables users to securely access multiple apps and websites with a single set of credentials, which reduces issues like password fatigue, which boosts security, lowers IT help desk load, and increases organizational efficiency.

How SSO works

To get your SSO in place, you need to find the right identity provider. The identity provider is essentially a service that securely stores and manages digital identities. An SSO works based on a trust relationship between the app and the identity provider.

Organizations establish a trust relationship between an identity provider and their service providers to allow their employees or users to then connect with the resources they need. Such a trust relationship is established by exchanging digital certificates and metadata. The certificate carries secure tokens which contain identity information like email address and password, to authenticate that the request has come from a trusted source and to verify identity. 

Although SSO can work with as many apps as the organization wants, each must be configured with a unique trust relationship.

How the Service Provider-Identity Provider relationship works

Once an identity provider is onboarded, every time a user tries to connect to a service provider, the sign-in request is sent to the central server where the identity provider is hosted. The identity provider validates the credentials and sends back a token. If their identity cannot be verified, the user will be prompted to log into the SSO or verify credentials using other methods like a TOTP. Once the identity provider validates the credentials it sends the user a token.

The token confirming the successful authentication is validated by the service provider against the certificate initially configured and shared between service provider and identity provider, after which the user can access the application.

The identity provider verifies the user credentials and sends back an ‘authentication token’ (almost like a temporary ID card) to the service provider. And, of course, all this happens in a fraction of a second.

Advantages of using SSO

  • Simplifies credentials management for users and admin
  • Improves speed of app access
  • Reduces time spent by IT support on recovering passwords
  • Offers central control of password complexity and MFA
  • Simplifies provisioning and de-provisioning
  • Secures the system as information moves encrypted across the network
  • Completely seamless/transparent to the user
  • Easy to add on new service providers

Akku is a powerful identity and access management solution that can enhance data security, efficiency, and productivity across your corporate network through its robust SSO feature. If you would like assistance on ensuring secure access for all your users to your organization’s applications, do get in touch with us.

What is ADFS and why do you need it?

ADFS (Active Directory Federation Services) is an SSO solution created by Microsoft to authenticate users logging into applications which are incompatible with Integrated Windows Authentication (IWA) and Active Directory (AD).

ADFS provides organizations with the flexibility needed to simplify the user experience while improving the control that admins have over user accounts across owned as well as third-party applications. Since ADFS implements SSO, your employees are required to remember only one set of credentials for all the applications. Continue reading What is ADFS and why do you need it?

The Importance of Single Sign-on for Educational Institutions

Let’s admit it: schools and universities today are not what they used to be back when we were growing up. Digitization has swept over almost every aspect of educational institutions. Classrooms have become “smart”, with blackboards being replaced or supplemented by LED screens. Students can simply log in to portals from where they can access information about grades, access lessons from learning apps, and more. Teachers don’t use physical attendance registers today; they mark the daily attendance of their students on tablets – data from which triggers automatic, customized messages to the parents of students who are absent from class.

With such revolutionary change taking over educational institutions, they are also under the rising threat of becoming the target of hackers. Therefore, it is important to ensure enhanced security across the network to prevent student and parent information from being exploited. What’s more, there are cases of students themselves becoming hackers these days – attempting to manipulate grades, using their fellow students’ information to bully them online, and engaging in other malicious activities.

Here are some ways in which a single sign-on solution can not only enhance security but also improve the efficiency of administrators in your educational institution.

Easy Provisioning and Deprovisioning

Every year, a set of students graduate and a new set of students are enrolled. This means that creating accounts and providing access to student portals is a never-ending process. More importantly, denying access to a student who no longer studies at the institution must not be overlooked.

With an SSO, administrators can view – in a single dashboard – all of the apps related to a particular user account and take action quickly and effectively without having to provision/deprovision accounts individually across apps or portals.

Instant Access to all Apps

A survey conducted in the USA showed that 25% of class-time is spent in troubleshooting and teachers trying to help students log in to their respective learning applications. In most cases, the use of multiple applications, and therefore multiple credentials, is the main problem here.

A single sign-on solution, as the name suggests, eliminates the need for multiple credentials, and with it, reduces the time taken to remember and correctly enter them. This also reduces the number of stray passwords, prevents users from writing down passwords and using other methods to remember credentials that are prone to compromise, and also reduces the time taken in resetting forgotten passwords.

Secure Password Policy Enforcement

Students of today may be sharp, but technology is sharper and acts as a double-edged sword. This is why, when it comes to protecting your network from brute-force attacks and other modern security threats, a strong password policy is essential. After all, a compromised password of a student could compromise the security of the entire network in more ways than one.

An SSO typically acts as the identity provider (IdP) to all the applications or portals used within the institution and, therefore, can be used to set up and enforce a strong password policy. This will ensure that passwords created by users of the institution’s applications meet a certain set of requirements with regard to length and complexity.

SSO and Beyond – Akku

Akku, by CloudNow, is an identity and access management solution that includes a powerful SSO functionality. But SSO is only one of many in a slew of features packed into this IAM solution.

Akku can also help you ensure safer interactions on the internet with filters, harness the power of YouTube for teaching/learning, use multi-factor authentication to restrict access to confidential data and more.

For more information on what Akku can do for your institution, get in touch today!