What does a day in the life of your customer look like? If I had to guess, it involves logging in to a computer, sending emails, joining a conference call, accessing multiple company platforms, and so on. The common denominator in all these scenarios? Passwords. Logging in and out of applications is a common step to get us through our workday and manage tasks.
Let’s be honest, as much as we all know it’s risky, most of us aren’t creating different accounts for each login. In fact, according to a 2019 Google infographic, at least 65% of people reuse passwords across multiple sites. And yes, it is very likely that this involves corporate and personal accounts intermixed. The potential outcomes? More data breaches. The 2020 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report shows that 80% of the data breaches involved credential and password-related attacks.
So, how can we move our users towards a better authentication strategy, where they don’t have to depend on passwords so much, yet they are likely to adopt new behaviors? Secure web single sign-on (SSO) is the answer. It means users can access all Cloud applications with only one strong authentication step.
Expand Your Business
For MSPs, this also brings the opportunity:
- Gain more user adoption: single sign-on is a great way to increase security while getting user acceptance
- Expand within a single customer: Web SSO, especially when you include products like Office365, could provide a great business opportunity, since you could be reaching up to 100% of the users within an organization.
- Target new customers: go after new accounts and offer them options that meet today’s remote work security demands
Selling the Value of Web SSO to Your Customers
Web SSO user adoption is key to enabling companies to increase security and productivity. On the user side: no need to memorize or depend on several passwords to access applications.
On the IT side: reduce password reset requests!
Key benefits you’ll want to pitch to existing and potential customers:
- Better user experience for your customers
- Eliminated password fatigue and risk
- One authentication with your network password + mobile token gives you access to all Cloud applications
- Account protection against unauthorized access due to weak or stolen passwords
It is obvious that adopting Web single sign-on could deliver a lot of convenience for your customer and opportunities to expand your business even within your existing customer base (upsell alert!). At a minimum, you’ll be increasing user adoption, reducing issues with password resets, and promoting more user-friendly security. But this can also mean your business and customers are en route to embracing a zero-trust security approach.
Guest blog courtesy of WatchGuard Technologies. Read more WatchGuard guest blogs here.
