Why Invest in Better SSO & MFA?

Streamline your security

Bad experiences. We’ve all had bad experiences with technology. Printers for instance. The mark of successful technology is the end user’s experience. That’s why successful brands are the slick and streamlined dolphins of the tech world and why many businesses get overtaken by the fast and furious competition. Users shouldn’t settle for less than dolphin status when it comes to logging in.

But balancing secure entry to your systems with that seamless user experience is key for modern businesses but can be a struggle to find. Single Sign-On (SSO) and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) go hand in hand to enable secure one-click access to all the associated applications and systems through multiple layers of authentication. Passwords, Touch ID, one-time passcodes and key cards are all examples of authentication factors. Finding the right balance between a secure login (MFA) and a time-saving user experience (SSO) is dependent on the technologies involved.

Wasting time to save time

Single Sign-On sounds like a user experience dream come true, saving time and increasing productivity by only having to log in once for all your applications. But there are two main issues to this:

Are all your work tools sitting under the same SSO? Or do you have an SSO for one set of applications but separate login credentials for everything else? Many organisations use Office 365 and Microsoft Azure’s MFA to protect their Office 365 applications. But these organisations probably also use other tools in the Cloud, such as Salesforce, HubSpot and DocuSign. These applications don’t present a single integrated experience, so will each require separate authentication processes to stay secure. Wouldn’t it be nice to have just one SSO and MFA for all your applications?
If MFA is interrupting the smooth-running of SSO, then you may end up losing your dolphin feel. Whether users have entered their verification code incorrectly or they’re confused with the authentication process, IT helpdesks can become inundated with unhappy employees. If you’ve got thousands of employees wasting their work time and costing the helpdesk a fortune, MFA ends up offsetting the benefits of SSO in the first place.

Free tools are the most expensive

Some companies rely on free tools like Google Authenticator, a free two-step verification app that uses one-time passwords to authenticate users of applications. The downside of this solution is the number of obstacles between the user and their applications: unlock your phone, open the app, find the application’s code, go back to your computer and manually enter the six-digit verification code, and only then do you have authenticated access. So, although you’ve got the added security of two-factor authentication, you’ve also got to jump through many a hoop for that second factor!

I just want a one-stop solution

Now for the streamlined dolphin of the authentication technology world. Imagine a solution where you can view all your SSO applications, on-prem and cloud, in one place. As an employer, you could revoke access to all those applications at once when an employee leaves the organisation. Imagine the simplicity of a push notification and Touch ID to instantly access all the tools you need to work.

Intragen implements only the best-of-breed solutions, meaning you can rely on us working with market-leading identity platforms with seamless SSO and MFA solutions. Our partner, Ping Identity, provides the optimum balance of security and user experience with an adaptive SSO/MFA solution for on-prem and cloud applications so that they all sit on a single landing page.

Get in touch today to find out more about better SSO and MFA.