You have likely seen the news about Slack. 

Slack resets thousands of user passwords four years after hack

They are resetting approx 1% (more than 100k accounts) user passwords after “new information from a 2015 security incident”.

Aside from the questionable 4-year-late development, there was an interesting footnote about accounts not affected: accounts logging in via single sign-on (SSO) provider.

This is a fact about SSO that people overlook!

Yes, Single Sign-On makes the user experience better.

AND

Of course it simplifies and saves time on administration.

But it also makes your organization a lot more secure .

Services like Slack, Atlassian, Saleforce, etc. will not see your users’ passwords because all authentication is handled centrally by the identity provider. Only the identity provider knows the user’s password.

None of the other services ever get to see it, hence they cannot loose it to one of the 1000s of data breaches every year

On top of that, if you only have to authenticate once, as opposed to entering a password in all 721 cloud services the average enterprise organization uses, it’s much easier to deploy 2 factor authentication–which has shown to be one of the key actions you can take to improve your system’s security.

To sum it up, Single Sign-On, especially when combined with 2FA, makes your enterprise IT precipitously more secure. And it manages to do this while easing your administrative load and providing you users a great IT experience. 

At resolution, we know Single Sign-On. If you need to integrate your Atlassian (Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, Bamboo) Server or Data-Center deployments into a SAML Single Sign-On infrastructure – check out our Apps.