Web Single Sign-On Meets Business Reality

Single Sign-On (SSO) will not provide SSO across all applications. Even scaling SSO to just Web servers is a challenge. While vendors will tell you how easy Web SSO is, and how quickly it can be deployed, the reality is quite different. This paper discusses some of the real-world operational challenges in getting a Web-only SSO deployed, starting with the impetus for why to deploy SSO; some considerations in vendor selection; operational considerations in a deployment, including challenges with having SSO and load balancing work effectively together; andk some compensating security controls.