Need For Speed Shift 2 Gameplay

How a unmarried sign-in speeds upwardly channel shifts

Security on the cloud

The thought of a Channel shift, or shifting contact with the public to digital channels, is increasingly bonny as public sector budgets continue to be cutting. The advantages have been confirmed by multiple reports.

Martha Lane Fox's report Directgov 2010 and Beyond: Revolution not Evolution found that moving 30 percent of government service delivery contracts to digital channels could save more than than £1.3bn a twelvemonth, and moving l percent would salve £ii.2bn a yr. A 2012 study by SOCITM estimated that contact transactions cost on boilerplate £eight.62 for face to face, £ii.83 for phone and 15p for web. The Regime has appear a list of public services which it will digitalise by 2015, which it believes will save taxpayers upward to £1.2 billion by 2015 and around £1.seven billion a year thereafter.

The challenge

However, the challenge is implementing digital services effectively. One of the biggest challenges is secure admission. Every bit anyone who's completed their self-cess tax return online knows, accessing online services tin can require a plethora of login details, passwords, reference numbers and security checks.

To protect against fraud, service providers need robust models of identity assurance to ensure that people accessing services are who they claim to be. Nevertheless, as users try to admission more than services online, they frequently discover that they need a different identify and password for each – increasing complexity and frustration and generating calls and emails to change forgotten passwords, which increases costs.

Aqueduct shift

Channel shift programmes will merely be successful if they provide a good user experience. There has to be an reward in accessing a service online, for case considering it is more convenient, saves time or lets a user achieve more in one transaction. If users have to set up new access details for each service, they will quickly lose patience and resort to traditional methods.

Could this solved past single sign-in? This would enable public sector organisations to build secure portals to provide to access to a range of services, including those provided by third parties.

Single sign-in has been a vision for many years, but historically has required meaning time and toll to create bespoke solutions. A lower cost arroyo is now available – using the cloud to provide a hosted unmarried sign-on service. This could cosign against a range of services, minimising complexity and reducing security and compliance risks and back up costs. Users could sign in to multiple services with a single user name and password.

Fordway is already providing a deject-based identity management service to a large public sector organisation, which enables staff and tertiary parties to admission services. This principle is directly applicable to public services.

No silver bullet

Single sign-in would not absolve the public sector owner of responsibility for security and compliance. They would demand to ensure security and compliance at all times, requiring an authoritative source of digital identity which could exist used as collateral for all generally available web services.

Nevertheless, it could reduce the time needed to develop new online services – and if this helps limited local authorities budgets go farther, it tin can merely be a good thing.

Richard Blanford is manager of Fordway which founded the company in 1991 and has congenital it into one of the UK'south most respected IT infrastructure change providers.