Balancing airtight security with a streamlined user experience is a tough act for many IT teams to pull off.

Proper identity and access management (IAM) requires keeping unauthorized users out through sufficiently strong authentication — think regular password resets, as well as password complexity requirements.

But implementing and maintaining these particular mechanisms and others is time-consuming work for IT, not to mention a frequent source of irritation for end users.

Gartner has estimated that up to half of help desk calls are for password resets, while Forrester has calculated the average cost of each reset at $70. So when IT teams manage all logins and credentials on their own, the overall complexity and price tag of this in-house approach to IAM can quickly become overwhelming, especially as users struggle with:

● Remembering passwords: Email passwords in particular are often forgotten, but password amnesia is common across all types of logins. A HYPR survey found 57% of respondents had forgotten a work password within 90 days of setting it, and 19% had to manage 10 or more passwords.

● Reusing weak credentials: Because passwords are tough to keep track of, making them simple enough to remember and reuse across accounts is a common workaround. However, such recycling increases the risk of data breaches, as successfully guessing just one password can provide a virtual master key to all of a user’s logins.

● Accessing the apps they need: As the number of cloud applications in regular use continues to rise, so do the challenges related to ensuring consistent access to business-critical tools. Okta found that enterprises used 68% more applications in 2018 than in 2014, for an average of 129 per company.

In light of these issues, single-sign-on (SSO) and multi-factor authentication (MFA) services from dedicated providers like Okta, SecureAuth and Azure Active Directory (AD) have become more common.

FaxCore now supports SSO integration for fax with these different service providers, for more secure login and intuitive IAM in day-to-day use. FaxCore customers, including an office supply chain, have already taken advantage of SSO to streamline FaxCore access without compromising on security.

What are the advantages of using SSO and MFA with FaxCore?

Adding FaxCore to an SSO and MFA authentication service is a win-win for IT teams and for the fax end-users they support.

How IT teams benefit

Single Sign On (SSO) integration enables simplified login access to multiple apps (including FaxCore and FaxFinder), using a uniform set of strong credentials or a token, backed by a federation engine and customizable access policies. IT teams can determine how each user and device must log in, all without having to bear the burden of constantly resetting multiple passwords, or worrying about the risks of those credentials being too simple or frequently recycled.

SSO solutions also allow for MFA enforcement as needed. Requiring an extra piece of information like a one-time code at login, or replacing the password altogether with a different credential, ensures that users really are who they claim to be and haven’t simply guessed right or entered stolen information.

In this context, FaxCore becomes part of a larger security fabric, with the same robust, multilayered protections as other applications integrated into the common SSO platform. Your team can save time thanks to the ease of integration and avoid the headaches of internally managing user authentication.

Setting up FaxCore within Okta, SecureAuth or Azure AD is straightforward.

Administrators do not have to be familiar with any of the particulars of FaxCore itself, as it simply appears as another supported application inside of those external services. At the same time, they can clearly see and granularly manage who has access to FaxCore, and easily find FaxCore within the SSO provider’s larger directory of integrated apps.

How end-users benefit

The combination of SSO and MFA lets users log in much more quickly than if they needed to maintain a bunch of disparate passwords. No longer do they have to juggle one password for Application A and another for Application B.

For example, when attempting to log in to FaxCore, users will be briefly redirected to an external page managed by the SSO provider, where they’ll log in before being sent back to FaxCore. This secure login also grants users access to any other SSO apps, all of them protected by the secure umbrella of Okta, SecureAuth, or Azure AD.
FaxCore is now more secure and easier to manage than ever. Get started by requesting a demo.