Single sign-on applications save money, boost security
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 1/1/2004 7:00:00 AM
Password proliferation—another byproduct of the Internet age—is more than just a nuisance to harried workers. It can drain productivity and threaten network security.
Industry experts estimate that the average worker in a company with 50 or more employees has to remember between five and 20 passwords. That same worker is likely to call the help desk for a password reset at least four times a year, at a cost of $25 per call. The only thing preventing more calls, the experts say, are informal password storage systems such as Post-It Notes taped to PCs or unsecured Word files, which easily compromise security.
"A way to improve password management was the number one request coming from our customers," says Bryon Thomas, a product manager with Citrix Systems, which recently introduced a product called MetaFrame Password Manager as an extension to its MetaFrame Access Suite.
The Citrix MetaFrame access suite offers a single interface for users to tap into all of the applications, systems, and data sources needed to perform their individual jobs. The MetaFrame Password Manager will let users tap into those application by a one-time sign-on, at the opening screen.
Password Manager matches users' front-end passwords to every application they need to access across the enterprise. It also employs agent technology to respond to all requests for new passwords from individual applications, and then links those news passwords to users' front-end passwords. Thomas says this eliminates most help desk calls for new passwords while also improving security, because users don't know—and thus don't have to remember—the back-end passwords.
MetaFrame Password Manager was designed as a component of the Citrix MetaFrame Access suite. In that mode, it can control all network passwords from the same server that houses the MetaFrame Access suite. But Thomas says companies can purchase single licenses for copies of Password Manager that can be loaded on individual desktop machines.
Other companies offering password management solutions include:
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CriticalPath
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Passlogix
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M-Tech
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