“Once we hide every thing from (users) and automate the use of passwords in applications, IT all of a sudden gets a great deal of control over what those passwords will be" in some cases, he said, and the users don’t really care so the policies are easier to enforce.

Other companies that offer single sign-on products include Active Identity, Computer Associates, Novell, Imprivata, and Sentillion, whose application is specifically for the health care industry.

When a Windows user signs on to his or her computer, v-Go Single Sign-On begins to run and pays attention to everything in that session, said Marc Boroditsky, CEO of Passlogix.

“You click onto Lotus Notes, and v-Go Single Sign-On sees it start up and takes control of the process and signs you onto Notes so you don’t touch anything. It gives a complex string of letters and numbers to get you in,’’ Boroditsky said.

Enterprises typically set up an automatic password change interval that might be every 30 to 60 days, he said. The system relies on Windows authentication so if a person enters a proper name, v-Go inputs the password.

For IT, the benefits of single sign-on systems are that they not only keep track of passwords but user IDs, Penn said. That’s particularly helpful for audit purposes, when IT needs to know who is accessing a system to make sure they are authorized to do so, he said.

If a company has 200 different identities stored and it takes five hours to reconcile all the different user accounts, that works out to be 1,000 hours per identity, on a quarterly basis, Penn noted.

Now when users at Clarian log into their computers, the system pulls down their credential cache stored in the various systems they need, so they are automatically logged into that system, which is both a time saver and a security measure, said Luter. Users can also store passwords they might have for external Web sites.

“This gives us a chance to make our systems secure without the user having to bear the brunt of complex password changes as they would normally, because they don’t have to think about it on a day to day basis,’’ he said.