SSO is the Coolest Thing Ever

October 25, 2024


It seems weird to be writing about single sign on (SSO), but it's seriously one of the coolest technologies I've ever used. SSO is a technological marvel.

For anybody unaware, SSO is a technology that allows you to sign into multiple services using just a single master login. It's mostly used by schools and businesses. For example, instead of signing into your work Gmail and then signing into your work Microsoft office, you can just log into one platform, click a link, and then your account for whatever service selected will pop up, no login page required.

Maybe people who are used to using this are rolling their eyes at me, but I've been using it in full for about 3 months, and I honestly cannot get enough. My first experience with SSO came when I had to make an account for school. I made a login for the school computers, but I found out that was also the login to my school Microsoft account. I didn't think much of it, as Microsoft owns both Microsoft and Windows. But then I clicked Gmail on my student dashboard, and it just opened Gmail, no login screen, no nothing.

The real magic of SSO came when I had to log into a Mac. Instead of having to use a separate login, I just used the login I used on Windows, and it just worked. Like, holy crap, this is cross platform? Why don't more people talk about this?

Fast forward to today, and I still love SSO as much as when I first started using it. Sometimes I'm just logging in just to use SSO. In fact, I don't think it does matter what I'm logging into. If you let me use SSO, I'll log into just about anything. Such a luxury experience.