The number of applications to which employees, partners and third parties have access has grown rapidly over the years, resulting in the average employee having at least 6 passwords and managers over a dozen. These managers often give their passwords to their PA’s who manage, for example, PeopleSoft and SAP approvals for them. This does not exactly raise the security profile of your company despite the many handbooks and procedures on this topic; it’s just a fact of life that it works this way.
To overcome this challenge, many software vendors offered a Single Sign-On (SSO) solution, which was a hype in the late nineties as the business case was easily made. The average user saves 10 minutes a day by using an SSO and the password helpdesk can be reduced by at least 30% as the number of queries dramatically decreases.
However, the number of corporates and institutions using SSO is still limited and there are two main reasons for this: lack of applicability and hierarchy. Applicability; indeed many software vendors had a solution but always for their own software; what good is an SSO for Outlook if you still have many other passwords for all your ERP systems? A more fundamental and security-related challenge was the lack of hierarchy in SSO; after all, you don’t want to give your call center employee access to the global SAP system.
TrustAlert has solved these challenges and can now provide a client certificate based hierarchical SSO solution, which is application independent and is built so that an employee, partner or third party can only have access to the application and information he is permitted to see. Another advantage we have is that we use existing AD’s and LDAP’s and as a result can set up this solution for you in days rather than months.
