We’ve all become more security conscious online with password protection being one of the biggest problems when it comes to potential malicious threats to our personal data. As we start using more and more websites and applications, the need to have unique passwords for each one becomes a goliath task.
It’s only normal that we’d use the same password for every website to save time, and ultimately, to save the pressure of having to remember 101 different variations of “Tuesday123”. However, we now know that this poses a massive security risk as a hacker only needs to get one password to access all your personal accounts.
A solution to this is a password manager, what the industry calls a Single Sign-On (SSO) application. With an SSO you will only need to sign in to your accounts on various websites and applications only once. It also means you can use a strong password with uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols, so it makes guessing very difficult for potential hackers.
Google SSO for you as a user
A great example of this is Google’s SSO which thousands of people across the globe now use to help sign in to sites without the need to remember a 14 letter and number password combination. When the pop-up appears on your screen, all you need to do is authorise Google to sign you in. The authorisation works by allowing the website you are trying to access to request Google to authenticate your details by checking them against your Google Mail account details. A benefit to using Google SSO is that a website doesn’t need to store your personal details as Google would have verified you and confirmed you are who you say you are.
The only limitation with Google SSO is that customers that use it must have a Google account. This does, however, represent a large number of users worldwide with over 1.5 billion people owning a Google account and that number is continuing to grow year on year.
Why should companies implement Google SSO?
As an online company, you want to make your customer’s experience as smooth and easy as possible, and more importantly, secure. Better yet, implementing Google SSO will give you access to a large number of potential users, both their personal emails and company emails for those that use the Google suite. These will help you understand your customers in more depth and understand their habits better so you can adapt your website and content to the right target audience.
To get you started on SSO Google, there’s plenty of tutorial videos to help you with set-up, but this will only be possible if you have technical experience or resource within your team with such. When considering your options do bear in mind that if you want to manage this in-house you will require someone to monitor this to make sure that it’s consistently working properly and not causing people to effectively bounce off of your sign-up or sign-in pages. Alternatively, there are also third parties that can help you implement and monitor this service for you.
Benefits to implementing Google SSO for your business
Why is this important you ask? The reason is that you’re making your website more accessible to your customers. One of the biggest turn-offs for customers is having to create new accounts with every website and application they want to use. SSO gives you the ability to remove the extra work and just login which in turn, means that you can convert more visitors from your website to regular users and thus improve the interaction they have with your product. It also means that you have less risk when collating too much personal data which would increase your cost in storing and protecting this data which is required by law. Another security benefit worth mentioning is that as customers will not be using weak and easy to guess passwords for your website it also helps reduce the risk of potential hacking like what happened with SolarWinds (the owners of Scopify).
The use of SSO applications has been growing massively over the last decade with more tech giants taking advantage of this process. Companies such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter have made headway in getting customers to use their SSO to log in to various websites. The great push to become more relevant to their users’ daily lives online has become a priority for their strategy. As the number of users increases so will the financial reward for the tech giants as they start to charge more for other services which rely on the number of regular users to their platforms.
What you should be doing as a business is getting on board with this by accommodating an SSO option on your site. This will help you get more users and hopefully increase interaction from their side. If you rely on sales to be processed on your site this will also increase your conversion as new sign-up forms are a big factor for customers not completing their purchases. This can be due to distrust with the website or if they are only going to purchase an item once it feels that the company is being intrusive by getting them to create an account for a single purchase. Remember the biggest gain here is to make the process as seamless as possible for the customer.
