SSO (OIDC / SAML)

Without SSO, each application manages its own separate login — its own password, its own reset flow, its own place for credentials to leak from. That's more attack surface per app and more friction per person, and it means an organization has no central place to enforce a security policy (require MFA, revoke access instantly) across every tool at once.

SSO centralizes authentication at an identity provider the organization controls, and applications defer to it rather than managing credentials themselves. OIDC (built on OAuth2, JSON-based, generally simpler to implement) and SAML (XML-based, older, still widely required by enterprise procurement) are the two standard protocols that make this work interoperably — most enterprise-grade applications support both, since large customers frequently mandate one specifically.

SSO is also the piece that makes instant, org-wide access revocation possible: disable someone at the identity provider, and — assuming the application checks session validity properly, and ideally pairs SSO with SCIM for account-level deprovisioning — their access to every connected application stops working immediately, rather than depending on someone remembering to log them out of each tool individually.