TIP #6: Implement Single Sign On (SSO)

Improve Security and Protect Your Data!

Tip #6: Implement Single Sign On (SSO).With the recent shift to a fully remote work environment, properly securing your data and information is more important and complex than ever. Thankfully your Salesforce platform was designed from the ground-up to support remote workers, providing you with a long list of built-in features and capabilities to help protect your data assets. One great way to bolster security, simplify the user experience and improve adoption is to implement Single Sign On capabilities.

By deploying SSO between your corporate authentication provider (Active Directory, Office365, GSuite, etc.) and Salesforce, manually logging in is avoided, improving security while increasing productivity. Sending an authentication credential that’s only valid for a single session also increases security for users who have access to sensitive data. Salesforce offers a set of best practices that you can follow when implementing federated authentication using SAML and single sign-on (SSO) for Communities. Best yet, this is available to most organizations at no additional cost and a minimal amount of configuration time.

Insight: One of the steps we have taken at Demand Chain to increase security for our team is deploying Single Sign On (SSO) across our entire technology footprint. With SSO, our team members only manage a single identity/password to access network resources, external apps, and Salesforce. We’ve also helped many of our clients implement SSO. For example, we recently completed a Salesforce project for Central 1 (Financial Services Organization) that delivered many high-level features and benefits, including Salesforce integration to their existing SSO. This enhanced trust, compliance, and governance across a business-critical app and empowered admin users to do their jobs safely and efficiently.

*Additional SSO Benefits:

Increased User Adoption – By simplifying the user experience of not having to log in, users feel more empowered and are more likely to use Salesforce regularly.
Reduction of Administrative Costs – With fewer passwords to manage, system admins receive fewer requests to reset forgotten passwords.
Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) – Leverage your organization’s existing MFA security to the login process.
Consistent Access and Audit Logging – Funneling user authentication across all systems through the same process simplifies user access and activity tracking.
Simplify Account Deployment / Deletion – Using SSO for all applications, user provisioning can be greatly accelerated and secured. With just one account to deploy or disable, access is quickly and safely applied or removed.
Single Log Out – With the addition of single logout, your users can log out from a single application and be automatically logged out from all connected apps.

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*Source: https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=sso_about.htm&type=5