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Comment by nkw | Hacker News Reader

As someone whose google account is tied to a scary number of services, e.g. our company's G Suite, Fiber, Music, Play, Store, Cast/Home, Nest, Adwords, Analytics, Webmaster Tools, etc., and is in the process of migrating a bunch (but not by google standards) of data and instances from AWS to Google Cloud the thought that some screwup in some random service gets my account obliterated and my company loses access to our Google Cloud resources (because I'm the admin account) scares the !*^%# out of me.

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Trust me. Single sign on is awesome. You WANT to have single account to manage all of that, and you should enable two factor authentication on it.

The alternative implying 100 separate accounts is so much worse.

It's like certificate authorities - it's awesome how easy it makes things if you can trust a single authority. Until the day you realize you can't actually trust it.

Single sign on = single point of failure.

Not single sign on = infinite points of failure

There still are infinite points of failure with SSO. Each service would need a trust relationship established with the SSO provider, any of which is a point of failure.

This is mathematically misleading. SSO adds a single global point of failure on top of the existing system. Single nodes will still fail in both circumstances, unaffected by the use or not of SSO.

I am not just talking about node failures but about the human failure too. The human cannot manage and remember accounts for a hundred services.

LastPass can for people, and automation can for machines. And then you are the one point of control of your destiny, not the SSO namespace owner.

And that makes LastPass your SSO :p

Completely disagree. I want a separate account for all my services. SPoF are a terrible idea. I miss when all my google stuff was separate accounts

For corporate accounts, I want the various cloud services to use systems that have been around since forever and a day. I want to be able to use systems like Kerberos to give Google Apps a service ticket so I can manage passwords on my server, with google only getting what user has successfully logged in. The cloud has set us backwards in single sign on, since everyone wants to be the gatekeeper.

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