As the demand for Software as a Service applications continues to grow, two-factor authentication (or "2FA") provider Signify (www.signify.net) has extended its 2FA hosted services to provide secure access to cloud-based applications including Salesforce.com and Google Apps. Two-factor authentication is becoming the de-facto standard for remote access to server-based business applications, yet most SaaS solutions still only provide authentication with static passwords that can be easily compromised, according to Signify's Wednesday announcement. To remedy this problem, Signify has extended its flexible and reliable 2FA hosted service to provide secure access to SaaS apps.
"With the growing popularity of corporate SaaS applications such as Salesforce.com and Google Apps that present access to potentially sensitive data in the cloud, it is an anomaly that most enterprises still rely on just a user name and password for authentication," Signify chief executive officer Dave Abraham said in a statement. "SaaS Login is designed to fill in this security blind spot with strong two-factor authentication and comply with industry policies and guidelines that increasingly specify 2FA for remote access. Many organisations do not realise that this includes access to SaaS applications."
In addition to 2FA, the new Signify SaaS Login component of the service allows users to identify and authenticate themselves just once for access to all their network or cloud-based applications using a single set of two-factor authentication credentials. Using the Security Assertion Mark-up Language authentication protocol, SaaS Login integrates Signfy's 2FA hosted services with SaaS applications. This enables users to log in using their existing two-factor token-based or tokenless credentials. Once logged in securely, Signify then allows one-click sign-on to each cloud or SaaS application, without requiring further authentication.
Signify's hosted service also makes it cost effective, fast and simple to deploy and manage 2FA across an organisation of any size without having to buy new equipment, integrate with existing systems or handle the implementation of the SAML authentication protocol in-house.
Read complete artitcle by David Hamilton in The Whir.
