Single sign-on
SSO
In short
Single sign-on means you authenticate once and are then signed in to every connected application. A central service vouches for your identity and the applications trust that assertion instead of keeping passwords of their own. The gain is not convenience. It is that there is now exactly one place where an account has to be switched off.
Why leavers are the real argument
Without SSO an employee has as many accounts as the company has applications. When they leave, each has to be closed separately — and the one that gets forgotten is precisely the risk that surfaces later.
With SSO there is a single switch. Disabling the central account closes every connected application with it. That is the practical discharge of a duty that exists anyway: access to personal data has to stay limited to what is necessary (Art. 8 FADP, SR 235.1).
The mistake we see most
Believing SSO is safer because there are fewer passwords. It is safer because there are fewer places for something to go wrong — provided the one remaining account is strongly protected.
Without two-factor authentication, SSO actually makes things worse: a stolen password then opens not one application but all of them. The two belong together, and in that order.
The dependency you have to plan for
If central authentication fails, nobody gets into anything. That is the price of consolidation and not an argument against it — but it does require a break-glass account that works outside the system and whose use is logged.
In Microsoft 365 that central service is already there and included in the common licences. So the usual job in a Swiss SME is not «introduce SSO» but «start using the SSO you are paying for» — connecting the applications instead of letting them run on separate passwords.
How we handle it
We connect applications to the identity that already exists, and set up the break-glass account before it is needed. Delivery under Microsoft 365 and Modern Workplace.
The question that exposes the need: how long does it take you to sign a departed employee out of absolutely everything?
Related terms
A term in your quote that nobody explained?
In a strategy call we translate the offer in front of you — even when it did not come from us.