How SSO boosts enterprise data collection

At Jotform, we’re constantly listening to and acting on the feedback we get from our customers.

Over the past year we’ve heard from our Enterprise customers, many with thousands of members/employees. These users often require complex data-collection capabilities. Health and certain education industries, in particular, need a higher level of security and data encryption to handle sensitive user data.

Many enterprises expressed a desire to ensure submission accuracy (and completion) when collecting a high volume of user data via forms and surveys. You’d be surprised how many incomplete, misspelled, or empty form fields are submitted.

Whether you’re talking about a university distributing thousands of request forms to their student body or a multinational corporation sending surveys to their global employees, that can create a huge data-collection issue down the line.

Additionally, most users at large enterprises are submitting Jotforms under their own account, creating hundreds, or in some cases, thousands of separate sign-in credentials. That means data is collected in silos on multiple platforms, and each one of those sign-ins presents potential security issues for organizations.

All of this gave Jotform an opportunity to help. Enterprise organizations can ensure the accuracy and security of their data collection at scale with single sign-on (or SSO).

With single sign-on, users’ data is already stored in your identity provider’s database. So when you enable SSO on your forms, users’ commonly stored credentials (first/last name, email, company role, etc.) are prefilled, preventing blank fields, misspellings, errors, and the like from being submitted.

Jotform’s single sign-on capability allows even the largest teams to use forms safely by logging users into Jotform with their SSO credentials (via your identity provider). SSO gives all authorized employees easy access and convenience, while simultaneously giving your company peace of mind because the organization is more secure, efficient, and flexible.

The enterprise moves toward SSO

For those new to the functionality, SSO allows employees to access various websites and applications by verifying their identity through a single sign-on. The employee is issued one master username and password to sign into a trusted third-party account, often known as an identity provider, like Windows or OneLogin. That provider then confirms the employee or member’s credentials, access, and, in some cases, access levels for the app or site.

The global market for single sign-on is expected to reach $2.2 billion by 2027, with the enterprise segment estimated to account for roughly half of that amount. In recent years, there’s been momentum toward SSO because it offers organizations benefits like a central database of user credentials, cost efficiency, increased security, and streamlined admin and IT efforts (think less time spent deactivating staff accounts when employees leave the organization).

Here’s a closer look at why enterprise investment in SSO is growing:

1. Accuracy
• A central database of user credentials lets organizations independently validate user details on the SSO server.
• SSO gives the organization a unified view of usage, helping companies internally segment user data and investment decisions (i.e., under-/overutilization of licenses), and externally measure and analyze response data.
2. Productivity
• The less time users spend looking for individual passwords (the average user has as many as 80 passwords) and logging into every app, the more time they can spend being productive in the app.
• Company owned or internally promoted apps tend to be used more frequently because they’re centralized in one place that’s easy for users to access and remember.
3. Cost efficiency
• Reducing the number of databases, systems, and help desk costs means lower maintenance costs for the multitude of apps that require separate logins.
4. Data ownership
• When individual users have their own sign-ons, data collection gets muddy. Technically, the user could argue that, though they work for the company, they own the data — not the company. With SSO at the enterprise level, the company owns all data collected through forms.
5. Security intelligence
• Eliminating thousands of potential data breaches closes the loop on attacks and provides one resource for identity maintenance. For example, Jotform offers 256-bit SSL, point-to-point encryption, PCI DSS Service Provider Level 1 compliance, and GDPR and HIPAA compliance to ensure form and submission data is secure and best in class.

How Jotform SSO benefits your enterprise

We first introduced single sign-on as a product feature of our Enterprise offering back in 2018. By integrating with Windows Active Directory, companies could sync their databases of usernames and passwords with Jotform on the back end, providing their users SSO recognition. Since then we’ve steadily added integrations with the world’s most trusted identity providers and further enhanced SSO’s functionality.

Let’s examine how Jotform SSO benefits both your users and your enterprise.

Improved form accuracy and completion 

Jotform’s SSO feature confirms that the form field information you need will be complete and accurate. Based on the credentials you select (i.e., first/last name, email, address, title, department, etc.) the proper data will be prefilled from your SSO server.

When analyzing a high volume of collected data or tabulating the results of large-scale surveys, you can be confident you’re making decisions based on accurate responses.

SSO protect and auto-save form information

You can SSO protect your forms to ensure that only authorized users in the organization can access them and fill them out.

Another cool SSO feature is auto-save. Just enable Save and continue later with the check of a box, and users can save a draft of their form. Since they sign in with SSO, their answers are saved, and they can continue filling out the form at a later date or time.

Let’s say a user logs onto your site and fills out a medical form, but they only complete part of it before exiting the site. When they return, they can pick right up where they left off without losing any of the information they already filled out.

Plus, users can update their information (i.e., relationship or family status, tax preferences, etc.) and resubmit the form as their information changes over the years. So instead of a user having to restart their forms from the beginning, there’s an improved and easier user experience for all.

Identity provider (IdP) integrations

Jotform works with major IdPs like Okta, OneLogin, Google, Microsoft Azure, and Windows. Don’t see your SSO listed? Don’t worry; we haven’t come across a provider we haven’t been able to configure!

Multifactor authentication

For those who need an extra level of authentication and/or security in concert with SSO, Jotform enables multifactor authentication (or MFA). MFA ensures a user is granted access to the form only after successfully presenting two or more pieces of proof. Two-factor authentication (2FA), an offshoot of MFA, is supported as well.

Peace of mind

Additional form security is a huge benefit. Nowadays, there’s no shortage of phishing and cyber fraud. It’s nice to know that the person who submitted your form is who they say they are. When you’re dealing with massive purchase orders, where potentially millions of dollars are at stake, the extra verification gives you peace of mind.

Not only do Enterprise customers enjoy SSO, branded domains, custom API integration, and unlimited forms and submissions, you also get live customer support, a dedicated success manager, and a local data residency center to host all your forms.

If you’d like to unite your organization’s users (a minimum of five) — or add more people — under your Jotform account and manage their access, learn how Jotform Enterprise can benefit your organization. Enterprises like Adobe, Redfin, the American Medical Association, Ford, Viacom, and more trust Jotform for both internal and external form submissions.

*Jotform’s single sign-on feature is available only for users with Enterprise plans.