You Don't Need a VPN Part III - Using Single Sign-On for Authentication

[BillB]

Think you need a VPN for your integrations? Chances are, you don't! In Part I, we discussed using a MID Server and User Data Imports and Authentication instead of a VPN. In Part II, we went over the ease of LDAPs-over-the-internet. In Part III, I want to discuss the option of using Single Sign-On as your authentication solution.

But what do you do if you need to authenticate? The best solution is a Single Sign-On (SSO) solution.   With full support of SAML 2.0, ADFS and an assortment of SSO providers, this is surely the way to go for authentication.

Using Single Sign-On for Authentication

Not everyone can implement an SSO solution. But if you can, you're in a good position.

The benefits of using SSO:

• gives you a great deal of flexibility
• provides an extra convenience for your users
• it's secure
• it's fast
• it's reliable
• it eliminates the need the need to use a VPN tunnel

About 70% of our customers use this method for authentication and those who use SSO have the least amount of authentication problems. In fact, authentication issues when using SSO are very rare. Contrast this with our customers who use tunnels and often find themselves in the midst of an "outage" simply because something in the tunnel path had a problem. I've seen it happen many times. Too many! These unnecessary "outages" can be avoided if SSO is chosen as the method of authentication.

But what do you do when you can't use SSO? See You Don't Need A VPN Part II - LDAP Integrations, User Data Imports, & the Internet solution.

This marks the end of our series on why you don't need a VPN. Remember, VPNs introduce a point of failure. When using a cloud-based service like ours, we have found that the most efficient, secure, and dare I say it, best, technology includes one of the methods described in this series that does not rely on VPN tunnels. Hopefully, in the not-so-distant future, these methods will become common and VPN tunnels will no longer be used at all. Till then, we'd like to see you get ahead of the curve!

Have questions? Contact Frances Angela Sarmiento