Thought Leadership

CloudShare Expands Single Sign-On (SSO) Support with OpenID Connect

The CloudShare Team

Aug 20, 2018 - 2 min read

Enterprise employees typically use multiple applications and technologies during their work days, with each requiring user authorization and authentication to maintain security. The single sign-on concept was born out of the desire to streamline this process across multiple applications, making it easier for enterprises to manage access permissions and simplify the user experience so users can avoid separate login processes for each application.

SSO eases the burden of user management. It allows users to access multiple services with a single login. Rather than set each user’s access to applications and data on an individual basis, SSO enables IT teams to manage all users from a central location, granting and restricting access as needed, and enabling changes to be made once and propagated across all relevant applications.

At CloudShare, we understand that enterprise customers prioritize security and need the ability to provide employees with unhindered access to the applications they need and use. By supporting SSO integration, CloudShare allows IT teams to ensure the company’s security policy is applied when logging into the CloudShare platform.

While the vast majority of enterprises employ an Identity Management System, these solutions may be based on a variety of SSO protocols. In order to support the latest SSO technologies and match our customers’ preferences, we’re pleased to announce that we have added OpenID Connect to our portfolio of supported SSO protocols, including WS Federation and SAML 2.0.

What is OpenID Connect?

OpenID Connect is an identity layer on top of the OAuth 2.0 protocol, an industry standard used by Google, Microsoft, IBM, Amazon, ForgeRock and other top organizations.

OpenID Connect is among the most advanced and secure SSO options available, with some notable benefits over existing protocols, including:

• Faster login
• Significantly easier implementation and integration
• Support for REST/JSON message flows
• Support for native apps and mobile applications, in addition to web-based applications

CloudShare is a business-critical application for our customers, whether they use us for delivering hands-on technical training, sales demos and POCs, and sandboxing. SSO integration makes CloudShare a seamless part of our customers’ business processes.

By supporting a wide range of SSO protocols, we ensure that our customers can choose the one that best suits their security and business needs.