Ask any business these days what their biggest concern is, and we think you’d be hard pressed to find one that didn’t mention security. With more devices, apps, and logins than ever, security is top of mind all across the enterprise.

One security dilemma we’ve run into with several clients is the issue of identity management: how do you tie authorization and authentication from the cloud back to corporate systems? Traditionally, that’s done through active directory or LDAP, but many enterprises we talk to don’t support an outside entity talking to their AD or LDAP server through the firewall. So what’s an enterprise to do?

Enter the world of single sign-on. With single sign-on, the cloud service provider forwards its authentication request back to the enterprise, and the enterprise passes back a ‘token’ saying who the user is and what they have the right to do. Single sign-on isn’t a new concept per se—it’s already seen some use before with LDAP infrastructures outside of the cloud—but the cloud has given it a new vehicle for actual use in the enterprise. And with more apps than ever in the enterprise, there’s as much of a need for single sign-on solutions as ever.

The maturation of MAM has given us a concrete use case for identity management and single sign-on in the cloud. Here at App47, we think this is a great sign of maturity in the MAM market. We have clients asking us ways to do single sign-on that don’t require complex workarounds for enterprises not prepared for them, and this is about as close to that sort of solution as we think the enterprise is going to see.

For our team here at App47, this may well be the ideal solution for identity management, but we’d love to know your thoughts. Have a different opinion or want to weigh in on your ideal solution for identity management? Let us know in the comments or by reaching out to us on Twitter—we welcome your comments!