“Finding my various account references/codes/passwords is the bane of my life!”
Can you identify with that statement? According to a recent LinkedIn poll, 96% of the participants had a bad login experience in the past. One of the main reasons is the need to remember multiple passwords. The average person now has 38.4 passwords - too many to keep track of. That’s where SSO can come in handy. But how does it work, and what are the advantages for your clients and employees?Â
What is single sign-on (SSO), and how does it work?
Imagine a library. Users could give their name and address every time they borrow a book - or they could have a membership card that gives them access to the whole library at once. It contains all the data necessary for the librarian to give you access.Â
SSO is similar to your library card. Your applications, like your email provider or social media platform, trust the SSO provider and let you gain access via your chosen SSO. SSO follows the rule of one: users only log in once each day and only use one set of credentials. After login, the SSO continuously identifies you as being verified so that they can move across other accounts seamlessly.
As a rule, SSO has three participants: The user, the service provider (for example, a platform like Twitter) and the SSO provider. Â
The 6 advantages of SSO
SSO creates a better user experience
Few things can reduce your profit as fast as a bad user experience. For example, cart abandonment caused by login problems is a severe problem for the e-commerce industry.Â
But constant problems with logins also create friction for your employees and keep them from doing their work.Â
SSO is essential for a good customer experience and ensures they enjoy the time spent on your website. That way, they are more likely to purchase from you and return.Â
And your employees don’t have to wait on password requests to access essential systems. Your IT team, in turn, can spend more time troubleshooting real problems instead of authentication issues.Â
SSO saves time
What would you do with 11 days and 17 hours? Trying to remember and reset passwords? We don’t think so. And yet, that’s what the average Brit is doing. Americans have it worse: they spend on average 12 days and 1 hour of their lifetime on this often fruitless pursuit. But there’s a way to solve that problem. Using SSO, your users can access the entire suite of company resources from a single “portal” and with just one pair of credentials—not dozens. This one-click access has clear and lasting time-saving benefits.
If you can save just 28 seconds per authentication and authenticate 6x per day, MIRACL can return over £329 per employee per year in time saved. That’s an ROI of over 8500%. And let’s not forget the time you spend trying to remember passwords from times past. MIRACL changes all that. Its single-step login MFA saves not only your time but that of the IT team as well. After all, you didn’t hire them to reset passwords.Â
Single sign-on speeds up logins where it matters mostÂ
The healthcare and finance sectors store some of the most sensitive data. That makes them very attractive to hackers and requires companies in this field to have the highest authentication standards available on the market. At the same time, speed is of the essence here. Employees need fast-paced and steady access to the applications. In the healthcare sector, delayed access or compromised authentication can literally be the difference between life and death. SSO is a real game changer for these industries. And no one does speed better than MIRACL: the single-step login MFA takes 2 seconds to log in with error rates as low as one-tenth that of passwords.
SSO helps with regulatory compliance
Companies and organisations have to comply with a lot of regulations. For example, Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) is a European regulatory requirement for which you need to build additional authentication into your checkout flow. For businesses based in the USA, that could be SOX, HIPAA or PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard). Failure to comply with these requirements can lead to hefty fines and losing the trust of partners and clients. SSO offers a safe solution. MIRACL meets the Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) standards of the EU Revised Directive on Payment Services (PSD2). Your organisation can quickly become PSD2 compliant for web and mobile banking when using MIRACL.
SSO helps your IT Helpdesk
With the average ticket costing $15.56, your service desk employees are a significant expense in your business. And they waste too much time on authentication issues. How can you tackle that? A single sign-on MFA reduces the number of login credentials an individual needs, so SSO users are unlikely to send a password reset ticket to the IT helpdesk. MIRACL frees up time and headspace for your employees and lets your IT team focus on essential tasks. A seamless login procedure improves productivity for all teams.Â
SSO increases security
Is there anything more important for your company than keeping your data safe? We think not. An SSO makes it much harder for hackers to access your accounts. There is simply less surface to attack. Human failure is also reduced: if you only have to remember one password, you are more likely to remember it. And as cloud application usage is growing, using a single login MFA is an investment not only in the present but in the future of your business.Â
Are you curious how that would look for your business? Subscribe to our newsletter to receive more information about MIRACL solutions, case studies and single-step MFA. Or return to our home page to use the employee calculator to see how much time you can return back to your staff.
Schedule a demo here to see how MIRACL can improve your company’s security while creating a painless login process for your customers or employees.
