I’m currently up to my eyeballs in reports on designing holistic frameworks for evaluating educational technology projects and platforms and wanted to jot down a thought I had regarding single sign-on (SSO).

SSO essentially lets you login to many different sites or applications without re-entering your username and password each time. From the standpoint of speed and convenience of access SSO is pretty nice, however there are issues with it that I think need to be borne in mind.

The issue that’s come to mind this afternoon is what happens when SSO goes down. If you are reliant on a central database or portal to provide you with access to many different sites, and the portal goes down, your access to each site is completely severed and you can no longer get in.

To me this is a major single point of failure that warrants a contingency. In the instance of sites that support OpenID for example you tend to have two sets of login credentials that you can use – a native account for your activities on that individual site and a second account that is recognised across many sites. If the OpenID provider goes down you’re not dead in the water, you just login with your set of local credentials.

Unfortunately most university services don’t work that way. You have a single username and password that’s recognised everywhere – but only one. Perhaps it’s time that these models are reconsidered.