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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.
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