Dropbox will add single sign-on (SSO), its latest feature for businesses as it seeks to penetrate the workplace market.
A couple months ago, Dropbox introduced a new admin console that gives administrators greater visibility and control over how their organization uses Dropbox. Now Dropbox adds single sign-on, a feature that works behind the scenes to let users sign in just once to a central identity provider, like Active Directory, and securely access all their business apps, like Dropbox. With SSO, companies can put their existing trusted identity provider in charge of the authentication process.
For users, SSO means ease - one fewer password to remember and one fewer step to get to your work. Once logged in to your system, there's no need to sign in to Dropbox separately. For IT admins, SSO means additional security and administrative management. Single sign-on gives you complete ownership of the authentication process and works with your company's existing password policies. It also easily ties into the existing Dropbox provisioning and de-provisioning API to provide further Active Directory integration.
Dropbox expects to add the feature next month. The company is working with a variety of identity vendors including Ping Identity, Okta, OneLogin, Centrify, and Symplified, and it's using the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) standard for its implementation.
According to Dropbox, its application is used in 95 percent of the Fortune 500 companies, and in 2 million businesses overall, which save more than 600 million files in Dropbox every week.