Single sign-on in a growing start-up
Sundell, Derek (2021)
Sundell, Derek
2021
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Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-202103163469
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-202103163469
Tiivistelmä
This thesis was written to reflect and report on a project to select and implement a single sign-on identity provider at Castor EDC. Castor was in an intense growth phase from under 50 employees to more than 100 the stringent and work intensive access control procedures were proving to be non-sustainable with such a large workforce. Thus, a single sign on service was deemed necessary to improve the scalability of the business. Single sign-on, on a longer timeline, would serve as the replacement to more manual access control procedures currently in place at Castor. The research problem was to determine what advantages the streamlining of access control, and access to services would have on employee satisfaction and effectiveness. Data was gathered via questionnaires of which there were three, two sent to employees before and after implementation measuring satisfaction, as well as one sent to service owners and administrators to gauge satisfaction with the current access control procedures. Additionally, comparisons were made to the standards to which Castor complies.
Once the project was underway and the single sign-on provider was implemented to some of the more widely used tools, advantages started to become apparent to the author. Onboarding to most general tools was streamlined and at the time of writing this thesis, the provider was being integrated with more department specific, yet critical, services. Data gathered from questionnaires revealed mostly lukewarm attitudes toward the password manager previously used with mostly positive first impressions of the new single sign-on provider. According to service owners and administrators, the access control procedure at Castor is error-prone and tedious. This procedure can be streamlined, as a result of SSO implementation. Recommendations to the client include, but are not limited to, adding single sign-on support as a requirement to Castor’s supplier purchasing procedure, rewriting access control procedures to allow for the single sign-on solution to replace old procedures where applicable, and in existing services disabling form-based authentication in favour of single sign-on.
Once the project was underway and the single sign-on provider was implemented to some of the more widely used tools, advantages started to become apparent to the author. Onboarding to most general tools was streamlined and at the time of writing this thesis, the provider was being integrated with more department specific, yet critical, services. Data gathered from questionnaires revealed mostly lukewarm attitudes toward the password manager previously used with mostly positive first impressions of the new single sign-on provider. According to service owners and administrators, the access control procedure at Castor is error-prone and tedious. This procedure can be streamlined, as a result of SSO implementation. Recommendations to the client include, but are not limited to, adding single sign-on support as a requirement to Castor’s supplier purchasing procedure, rewriting access control procedures to allow for the single sign-on solution to replace old procedures where applicable, and in existing services disabling form-based authentication in favour of single sign-on.