How many passwords do you have?
Ten, 20, 100?
Well, if you're like me, I've got 750 unique passwords, strongly chosen,
and thankfully, I don't have to remember most of them.
I'll let you in on the secret.
So how do most people solve that problem?
It's a problem that was created by the security department who had good intentions of making
you choose strong passwords.
But strong passwords are generally hard to remember.
So what we end up with is this thing that has been referred to as "PC sunflower".
It looks like this.
It's a display monitor with a lot of little yellow stickies all around it, each one of
them with the user ID and password.
Obviously, not a very secure solution.
What is a potentially other alternative that people do?
Sometimes they take all those passwords, don't put them on the monitor on the little yellow stickies.
Instead, they put them in an insecure file like, say, a flat file, an Excel spreadsheet,
or even an email to themself.
Also, not a good solution.
Or, the third alternative most users choose with-- left to their own devices is --is they
set all the passwords to the same thing.
Which again, not a good choice because if you are able to figure out the password on
one system, you get it on all.
The whole thing falls like a house of cards.
So, what are the alternatives?
Well, let's look at why we have this problem in the first place.
So we've got a user here who needs to log in to, let's say, a number of different systems
down here.
So this is system 1, system 2, system N.
Now, this user needs to log in, so they're having to log in here with password 1.
They log in here with password 2.
They log in here with password N.
And the guy is up here with this issue because he can't remember all of these passwords.
So that's why he went with those other solutions that I was talking about, which are not secure.
They're not getting us to where we want to be.
And the user has this conundrum of trying to figure out how they can solve the problem.
Now, what's a better alternative?
Well, let's put that user over here, and this time we'll have him log in to his multiple
systems --system 1, 2 and N. Except in this case, he's going to not log directly
into the system, he's going to log into a thing I'm going to call a single sign-on manager.
This is a special tool, software usually, that's designed so that you log into this
with a single password that you've chosen that's complex, and then it remembers the
passwords for all of these other systems.
So we have a unique password for each one of these systems.
So this would be password 1-- actually, this would be password A --to get you into
the single sign on.
This is password 2 and this is password N. So now we have a case where the user has
to keep up with only one password, which is good news for that user.
Now they feel this way.
One password to get into all of the systems.
So that makes their user experience much better.
Now, what's the problem with this?
Some people would argue-- security types often do this --that now you've introduced a single
point of failure (SPoF).
In other words, if someone figures out this password, they can log in here and therefore
get access to all the others.
Well, I'm going to say, first of all, to the people that expressed this objection, have
you ever met one of these guys?
Do you know how they're solving their problem?
Remember what I told you?
They're putting them in insecure places.
Or, if they're not doing that, they're setting password 1 to password 2 to password N.
They're choosing a single password for everything anyway.
So, it's the same problem.
The difference is, if it's the same password in this scenario, then knowing the password
here means you know the password here and here-- and they all fall.
In this case, if someone knows the password here because they were able to hack that system,
they do not know what these passwords are because they're unique.
So what that does for us is lessens the attack surface to a single system at a time.
And if you say "But how do I protect this?"
Now we're going to do that with multi-factor authentication.
With this now, it's not a single password that gets you in, it's also something you
have or something you know or something you are.
It's some combination of those things.
So now I have a secure gateway into this system, and there it unlocks all the rest.
So with a solution-- with single sign-on --we end up with some distinct benefits.
One of those is we end up with better security.
Better security for the reasons I just talked about.
That is, we don't have one system falls and they all fall.
Now we have one system falls and that's the extent of the damage.
We have a better savings, cost-wise.
Why is that?
Well, it turns out if a user has only one password to remember, they're much more likely
to remember it, therefore not forget it,
therefore not need to call into the help desk in order to get it reset.
And the statistics tell us that the number one call to most help desk is "reset my password".
Sometimes is as much as 50% of the calls into the helpdesk.
That means half of your helpdesk calls is just supporting the password reset problem.
We can lessen if we used a single sign-on solution.
And then at the end of the day, we also get an improved user experience.
This user has only one thing to remember.
Therefore, they don't need the PC sunflower.
They don't need the Excel side file.
They don't need to set all their passwords to the same thing and compromise security.
So this is one of these rare situations that we need to jump on because we actually get
to improve security, lower cost, and improve the user experience.
Thanks for watching.
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