Understanding Your Implementation Challenges with SSO in the Cloud

With so much of your business’s mission-critical processes and applications hosted in the cloud these days, single sign-on (SSO) can be a valuable feature for your user identity and access management.

However, due to the unexpected shift to fully remote working during the COVID-19 lockdowns, most businesses were forced to make quick decisions about implementing new cloud solutions to maintain business continuity.

In many cases, this meant neglecting some foundational aspects of a successful technology implementation, particularly with architecture and integration. Of course, this creates a number of challenges when attempting to continue with these new solutions long-term.

If you, like many others, rushed to put SSO in place to streamline the identity and access management features of your remote cloud environment, you’ve likely experienced challenges as well.

It’s important to understand that SSO is only one piece of a much bigger puzzle, and it has to fit perfectly. To avoid the risk of failure, you should be aiming to sync up your entire infrastructure, including on-premise technology, cloud deployments, third-party integrations, security, legacy systems, and more.

Yes, having SSO as part of your cloud managed service can streamline workflows for your users, and save time by removing time-consuming log-in processes. Additionally, with a number of other benefits for your IT team, especially within highly regulated industries, SSO is an effective way of improving the overall efficiency of your workforce.

But it’s also a complex technology and, as with any IT product or solution, you must have the necessary expertise and knowledge to implement it successfully.

For SSO to work well, it requires the ability to seamlessly bring together all the identities and credentials within your corporate network into one single identity store. If this strategic approach has been underestimated or overlooked, it’s likely you’ll need specialist support from a dedicated identity and access management partner.

If the issues mentioned here resonate with you, read our latest article, where we provide guidance for minimising the risks and overcoming the challenges related to SSO.