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Product release: How single sign on (SSO) protects your business

Security attacks and data breaches are on the rise, with businesses reporting a total of 3,950 confirmed data breaches in 2020 alone. The security of your private information has never been more important.

To counter this, MessageMedia has launched our newest feature: single sign-on, also known as SSO. It’s likely you are already using SSO with other applications as more and more businesses are employing this security measure to better protect themselves, their employees, and their information.

What is single sign-on (SSO)

Simply put, SSO is an identity management system that allows a business and its users to gain entry to multiple applications with just one set of user credentials.

What does this mean?

A user, whether they’re an employee of your business or a single business administrator, will not need to create an entirely new username and password to access our SMS services. SSO enables users to simply sign in using their account with another trusted service.

Basically, SSO allows trusted websites (aka central authenticator) such as Microsoft, Linkedin, Facebook, or Google, to verify a user’s identity. Once the user’s identity has been validated and the company requesting this validation (i.e. MessageMedia) is also checked, only then is user access granted.

Imagine SSO as an invisible license or passport that is stamped by a trusted party to allow you access to online software or services.

Benefits of using an SSO solution

For users and businesses there are multiple benefits:

  • Maintenance – Easy for you or your account administrator to maintain user access and information. If multiple people are joining or leaving the company, you can easily revoke, give or check access all from your MessageMedia account.
  • Security – We do not keep any sensitive information such as passwords that could be accessed by malicious hackers.
  • Cost – There is no additional cost to use this service.
  • Convenience – No need to remember multiple passwords with just one set of credentials.
  • Efficiency – SSO cuts down on time-taking login and authorisation processes, especially if users are already logged in to a trusted third party.
  • Control – It’s up to you which third party can verify and share your details. You can also choose not to use it too.

NOTE: Please be aware that our SSO only accounts for AzureAD logins (Microsoft/Office365) at the moment. We will be expanding these options in the coming months. If you have a trusted provider you would like us to support, get in touch and we will add it to the list.

Is SSO right for my business

If you’re a mid-size to enterprise business with multiple users accessing our SMS service, then SSO is perfect for you. Each user may also require different levels of access due to the complexity of the account or its sub-account structure. Access can be easy to organise and maintain with SSO.

However, SSO can be useful to any small business or single user who finds they spend too much admin time tracking all of their logins and digital tools! Talk to us and we can enable this feature for you too.

How to add SSO for your business users

Eager to start? It’s easy for enterprise customers – learn how to enable SSO through the web portal. If you are a non-enterprise customer, contact support@messagemedia.com and we’ll enable SSO implementation on your account.

If you are using an identity provider like Azure, here are instructions for setting up MessageMedia SSO with Azure.

If you have any questions or are finding it difficult to set up, check out our MessageMedia SSO FAQ or chat with our helpful staff who can walk you through the process.

Final thoughts, further reading

Protecting your information and ensuring your security is of prime importance to us. MessageMedia will continue to take steps to make sure that your service experience continues to improve and that you are given the best options to protect your data.

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