Definition
SSO (Single Sign-On)
Single sign-on (SSO) lets users access many applications with one set of credentials, authenticating through a central identity provider instead of a separate login per app. Sign in once and you're recognized everywhere connected. SSO improves security and user experience at once — fewer passwords to reuse or forget, and centralized control over who can access what.
Key takeaways
- Single sign-on (SSO) lets users access many applications with one set of credentials, authenticating through a central identity provider instead of a separate login per app. Sign in once and you're recognized everywhere connected. SSO improves security and user experience at once — fewer passwords to reuse or forget, and centralized control over who can access what.
- With SSO, an application no longer stores its own passwords.
- Planoda supports SSO via SAML for enterprise workspaces, so organizations can centralize authentication and access control through their existing identity provider rather than managing separate Planoda credentials.
With SSO, an application no longer stores its own passwords. Instead it trusts a central identity provider — via standards like SAML or OpenID Connect — to verify who a user is. When you visit an app, it redirects you to the provider; if you already have a session there, you're sent back authenticated, often with no extra step. One identity, established once, unlocks every connected service.
For organizations, the real value is control. SSO centralizes the entire account lifecycle: IT grants access by enabling an app for a user in one place, and — crucially — revokes it everywhere instantly when someone leaves, closing the dangerous gap where a former employee retains logins to scattered tools. It also lets the company enforce its own security policy (multi-factor, password rules, conditional access) once, at the identity provider, for all apps.
SSO is often paired with SCIM, a companion standard that automatically provisions and deprovisions user accounts from the identity provider, so directory changes flow into each app without manual setup. Together they are table stakes for enterprise software, which is why SSO typically anchors a product's top, IT-administered tier.
Planoda supports SSO via SAML for enterprise workspaces, so organizations can centralize authentication and access control through their existing identity provider rather than managing separate Planoda credentials.
Related terms
- RBAC (Role-Based Access Control)Role-based access control (RBAC) governs what users can do by assigning them roles — such as admin, member, or viewer — that carry defined permissions, rather than granting rights to each person individually. It scales access management: change a role's permissions once and every user with that role updates, and onboarding becomes assigning a role, not wiring up dozens of grants.
- Multi-TenancyMulti-tenancy is an architecture where one running application and database serve many independent customers (tenants), with each tenant's data strictly isolated from the others. It lets a SaaS product share infrastructure for efficiency while guaranteeing that one workspace can never see another's data — a guarantee enforced in the data layer, not left to hope.
- Row-Level Security (RLS)Row-level security (RLS) is a database feature that restricts which rows a query can read or modify based on the current user or context. Instead of relying solely on application code to filter data, the database itself enforces access policies on every query — a strong defense for multi-tenant systems where one workspace's data must never leak to another.
- Audit TrailAn audit trail is an append-only, time-ordered record of who did what, when, and to which object across a system. Every create, edit, delete, and approval is logged immutably, so any state can be traced back to the actions that produced it. Audit trails underpin accountability, debugging, compliance, and — increasingly — oversight of what AI agents do.