Last week in our weekly discussion I talked about the manufacturing industry. For this kind of
industry, I believe that implementing Single Sign-On would be a great benefit. Many manufacturing
corporations have many applications for different functions. Examples of these are ERP systems,
Quality Software, General Applications like Adobe Acrobat, and also Office 365. Each one of these
applications requires a password to log in.
The issue with this is that users tend to reuse their passwords for these or forget the password for
each one. Single Sign-On definitely solves that problem as the users only need to memorize one
password. With that being said then you can implement a stronger password requirement and users
may be more open to creating a single strong password. They are able to memorize that one strong
password. With that being said it is important that the company also implement MFA (Multifactor
Authentication). This adds another layer of security to their SSO. If the account is compromised then
at least MFA may have a chance to stop the unauthorized access attempt.
Based on the article from Cynexlink, the advantage to SSO is the reduced amount of password
requests. This will allow Computer Engineers to focus on other critical tasks and reduce the need to
spend time changing someone’s password. The process is more streamlined which accessing many
applications are seamless. The disadvantages however are that if the credentials are compromised
and MFA is not enabled then there is access to many applications. Also, if the authentication server
is unavailable then access to the other applications is not possible until the issue with the
authenticator server is fixed.
On another point, we also have SSO using social media accounts. I am not a fan of this. This is
because are providing your credentials from the social media sites to the third party that is
requesting the information. Many times, you are given access to much more than the credentials.
Sources:
https://cynexlink.com/latest-articles/single-sign-on-pros-and-cons/
https://www.passcamp.com/blog/security-and-privacy-risks-social-logins/
