Organizations need to have complete control over their enterprise: assets, company data, employees, etcetera. After all, the public hears more horror stories about data breaches, unauthorized entries and the theft of intellectual property every day.

In order to protect your organization from the current threat landscape, enterprises need to have policies and solutions that enable employees to safely access information they need when they need it. However, password management is evolving into one of the most problematic issues companies face. As the number of business applications grow, so do the number of passwords -- as well as the difficulty that needs to be associated with them. As a result, passwords have become extremely difficult to manage; users are leaving them open to the public, and help desk costs are rising in response to users forgetting passwords.

As passwords have proliferated, it has become increasingly difficult for users to remember them. Often, when users forget passwords, they are then locked out of the applications they need to perform their job. Becoming frustrated, they call the IT help desk for assistance. According to Forrester Research, more than 30 percent of all help desk costs are password related. The cost of password problems can quickly add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for even mid-sized companies -- and that's not even factoring in the cost of lost productivity when users are locked out of needed applications due to forgotten passwords, or the potential security issues if the passwords are written down on sticky notes.

In response to these challenges, a growing number of organizations are turning to single sign-on (SSO) solutions. SSO has emerged as an easy, smart and affordable means for organizations of all types and sizes to strengthen IT security while improving employee productivity. It simplifies the problem by only requiring a user to remember one primary credential -- user name and password or strong authentication method -- to gain access to the full portfolio of authorized applications, data and services. This means each user's network identity will have all the relevant application credentials linked to it and authentication will be managed automatically by the SSO system. This translates to spending less time logging in and out of network applications and more time on pressing matters. In healthcare, for example, eliminating the need to constantly type in logon passwords adds more direct time to treating patients.