Having gone through a tender process, the university narrowed down to a shortlist of SSO providers. These companies were than invited to participate in an onsite proof-of-technology exercise, to prove that the proposed solutions would fully meet the university’s needs. Of the companies involved, ProofID was able to demonstrate full compliance with the requirements within the given timescale, and accordingly the university selected this solution, based upon PingFederate and PingOne from the market leading SSO vendor, Ping Identity.
A key aim of the project was to extend SSO to as many applications as possible, to provide a ‘unified SSO’ experience; the university was operating three SSO technologies covering different categories of applications (internal external and UKAMF), so it was essential that SSO could be provided to all applications via PingFederate. Also, the university wanted ‘seamless SSO’ where possible, meaning that once a user had authenticated to their computer, there would be no need for further logins.