For several years now, the enterprise has been searching for single sign-on (SSO) solutions. Early ones were proprietary and unwieldy, but standards have been emerging, most notably Security Assertion Markup Language, or SAML.

"SSO is a must," says Mike Kail, vice president of IT operations at . "Once your employees start using Workday, Box and other cloud services, they start littering those services with passwords -- some unique, some not -- and any business is only as secure as its weakest password."

SAML is an XML-based framework that lets service providers exchange security information. That way, a third-party or cloud application doesn't need to store any authenticating information from your organization. Instead, SAML will deliver your users' credentials (typically from Active Directory or LDAP) to the service provider, which won't need to maintain those credentials.

Through SAML, your organization can deliver information about user identities and access privileges to a cloud provider in a safe, secure and standardized way.

The only trouble is that SAML is a B2B solution, and it's not currently set up so that it can be easily extended to consumers. This is important because if a new social network comes along that your business hasn't authorized, your employees will still set up their own credentials with that service provider. Hackers will still be able to glean valuable information from other sites in order to socially engineer attacks. If your employees have reused a strong password elsewhere, hackers may even be able to use that to penetrate your organization.