3 Benefits Of Using Single-Sign-On (SSO) For Schools

The use of technology has become an integral part of daily life, and as it continues to spread across the school campus, staff, students, and parents are running into an ever-present problem: remembering and managing multiple login credentials.Single sign-on (SSO) technology enables schools to manage all their user's login credentials from a centralized system, so they only have to remember one set of credentials to access all their apps.Boardingware now provides SSO capabilities for schools to manage staff, student and even parent login details from their centralized identity provider. Boardingware supports the SAML 2.0 protocol which is compatible with most user-directory systems, including Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS), Google Apps, and Okta.Single sign-on solutions have been extremely helpful for schools to manage and protect their data. Here are 3 simple ways your school can benefit from SSO.

1. User Adoption and Experience

With SSO, the user doesn't have to remember multiple username and password combinations. They only have to remember one. This simplifies the authentication process and reduces password fatigue - Yes that's a thing.SSO also makes it easy to add new users to your school software systems. The sign-up process can be managed via your school's identity provider, so students, staff, and parents can sign-up with their existing school login credentials.This is a huge administrative burden removed and means that schools can scale-up its adoption of software systems easily with minimal impact on the IT department.

When you use SSO with Boardingware, users will be able to login either through app.boardingware.com or through a custom URL link such as yourschool.boardingware.com (just ask us to create one!). Plus it works on iOS, Android, and the Web, so your staff, students, and parents can securely login experience on any device.

2. Reduce Support Costs

When you have SSO, you have fewer passwords to remember which means fewer calls to the IT helpdesk about forgotten passwords.This might seem like a small benefit, but when you consider the administration required from IT to reset a password, and then multiply that by a 100 people, it's easy to see how costly it can get for something so mundane.

3. Security and Compliance

Compromised login credentials and weak passwords are a potential security and data privacy risk. SSO providers help to improve password security by reducing the number of complicated passwords users have to remember to just one (or at least a few) and provides schools with centralized control to enforce password change policies.SSO identity providers also supply schools with a single point of control for access to data.This is useful for when an employee or student leaves the school. Administrators can easily remove their SSO account and therefore access to any data in your systems. This also helps to satisfy compliance regulations such as HIPAA and SOX.

When you integrate Boardingware with your SSO provider, you have the ability to create multiple authentication profiles. Each profile also provides you with the option to enable or disable SSO for specific user types. This granular level of control gives you the flexibility to configure your SSO to match up with your existing user-directory setup and access control policies.

Using SSO with Boardingware

To learn more about how you can integrate Boardingware with your SSO provider, check out our support article from our help center.If you have any further questions or feedback, please leave a comment below. I'd be more than happy to help :)Curious to understand how Boardingware works? Click here to book a live demonstration with one of our experts or watch our 20-minute demo video.