Expertbrief Single Sign-On for Organisations

Door Ernst Lopes Cardozo e.a. 18 mrt 2007

Single Sign-On (SSO) for Organisations – also called Enterprise Single Sign-On (ESSO) – is often presented as an actual product or system with specific features such as the central registration of identities and their attributes. However, SSO is actually comprised of a wide range of mechanisms that have little more in common than the fact that users usually do not have to login again when they switch between applications. In this document we shall therefore consider SSO to be a feature of strongly divergent architectures. This has consequences for the arguments that affect the business case. We have limited our discussion to the enterprise environment, where users have a formal relationship with the organisation, such as employees, students and patients. In this type of environment it is both desirable and acceptable for users to have a single unique digital identity for all the applications. Which type of SSO is suitable for your organisation, which arguments play a role in your business case and which issues will have to be addressed during implementation?