Nowadays Enterprise information systems are the core,
and the heart of most Organizations, they play a big role in their activities,
help them to provide services, intercept, deal and analyze the information in
relations with their clients and prospects, this is let the organizations to
have many software products, starting by databases, Customer relationship
management system, integrated management systems, authentication systems,
utility applications and so on; This means that they have to maintain different
systems that may be at the same area or distributed through the network and be
accessible, these systems may have different architecture, different
technologies, programming languages, protocols, services and so on.
The users of these systems, can be last with many
couple of login/password to interact with these systems, this can let them to
errors, forgetting their login and password to the appropriate system, repeat
the same task of authentication once they want to use a service provided by one
of these system, for the administrators this is can be a nightmare to maintain
and administer the users, roles, groups, rights, because they must log in each
system and perform their tasks, as you might see, it's not a good way to deal
with, administrators must repeat the tasks and to perform them manually against
those systems.
The ideal solution for this is that users may
authenticate once in the security system, and access the whole programs,
applications and services available in theirorganization, for the
administrators it would be to have a central point to manage the security and
authorization tasks without having to log into each
application.
Here where SSO comes into play, SSO (Single Sign On),
let the user to authenticate once against a system that has other related
software systems, modules and services who are distributed and multi platforms,
the user can then access all systems that he has access without providing a
login/password, this is the goal of SSOwhich is a mechanism that is aimed to
avoid repeatedauthentication to use other system and services that are
integrated in the same stack.
The benefits of SSO are:
§ Enforce
the passwords strength used.
§ Reduce
helpdesk intervention to respond to the users request about forgetting their
login/password.
§ Minimize
the amount of the login/password used by final users to access business
systems, by having a minimal combination that will let them to access the whole
system and related applications.
§ Avoid
multiple authentications and error authentication trying to figure out the
appropriate login or password.
§ Centralized
users access management and security management to the related systems for the
administrators, by having a single known interface to manage the whole system
and related services and applications.
§ Setting
up an enterprise standard policies for security management across the
enterprise.
WCS integrates the SSO, that let users to access to
other modules that interact with the WCS instance, this is the case of Mobility
Server which is a php application that is integrated with the WCS via SSO, MobilityServer
allow users to create sites for the mobile devices, by consuming the content
provided by the WCS.
