1Password – Six Colors

My thanks to 1Password for sponsoring Six Colors this week.

Imagine if you went to the movies and they charged $8000 for popcorn. This is something like what IT and security professionals feel when a software vendor hits them with an outrageous premium for Single Sign-On (SSO), often by lumping it into a product’s enterprise tier.

So the enterprise tier is priced only for large companies… but companies of all sizes need access to SSO. In a world where compromised credentials are the number one culprit in breaches, SSO reduces the number of weak, reused passwords flying around. It’s also critical to onboarding and offboarding, since IT only has to manage a single on/off switch, instead of managing access separately for every application.

Until outraged customers can shame vendors into getting rid of the tax, many businesses have to figure out how to live without SSO. For them, the best route is likely to be a password manager like 1Password, which also reduces weak and re-used credentials, and enables secure sharing across teams. To learn more about the past, present, and future of the SSO tax, check out 1Password’s blog post.