Identity Myth: SSO is Hard; Truth: Old Apps Suck

I sat down with a very smart group of folks and they were saying how they think SSO is very, very hard. If your world is all Active Directory (AD), it’s easy. But that is true in a tiny percent of the world. Everywhere there is some odd ball application and in most places there are just as many applications not using AD as there are using it (even if they buy Quest solutions, sadly). The cloud, something everyone is forced to mention in every tech blog post, also complicates this. How do you do SSO when the identities aren’t under your control? Or, reverse that, how do you get SSO from your cloud vendor when your on premise applications aren’t under their control? But every time I have the SSO conversation at length with people the conclusion is always the same. If all you have are applications from the last 10 years and some cloud stuff, there are approaches, including Quest’s, that can fully solve that problem. You can integrate into your commodity AD authentication, put up SSO portals, or use widely adopted standards like SAML – or all of the above in a clever combination. Even thick client GUI applications can be tamed with enterprise SSO (ESSO) solutions at the desktop. The things that always end up falling through all the cracks are older applications. Things that are often the crown jewels of the business. Applications that are so old because they are so critical that no one can touch them without huge impact to the business. But the older technologies resist almost every attempt to bring them under control. Even ESSO, which is the catch all for so many other laggards, can’t tame many of the odd green screens, complex multi field authentications, or other odd things that some of these applications demand at the login event. When I’ve spoken to our SSO customers, they always seem happy with 70-80% adoption on their SSO projects. They know they will never get that last group until the applications change. But there doesn’t seem to be any compelling event for those applications to be changed. So SSO continues to seem hard, but we all know that’s not exactly true.