The road to single sign-on
ENT News | at | by Mike
Single sign-on. Symbolically at least, it may be a kind of grail for IT staffers who today need to administer thousands of user accounts -- often a jumble of weakly-related identities stored in a dizzying variety of directory management systems in different environments.
Corporate end users have an average of about 16 separate passwords that they need to remember, according to a 2003 Gartner survey of more than 300 enterprises. "Some vertical industries will have higher numbers of passwords because they have more internal applications, but between one and two dozen is a good [ballpark figure]," says Earl Perkins, analyst in Gartner's security and privacy group.