Have you ever thought about how much time your employees spend logging into all the different apps and websites they need to get their job done? Think about it. How long does it take each employee to remember the username and password combination for the right site, and then how long do they spend actually getting onto the site? Now multiply that by the number of employees in your organization. Can you imagine how much time is wasted each day in your entire company on the simple process of logging onto sites to get work done?

Employees at Salesforce access over 200 different apps and websites on a given day. Each employee once had to remember the URL, username, and password for these sites, and then they had to figure out the right combination of URL, username and password—or risk the dreaded lockout message, “too many attempts, try again later.” We also realized that as a result, our help-desk was spending an inordinate amount of time resetting passwords, leaving more critical needs unaddressed. That’s when we thought, how can we increase employee productivity, while also strengthening our security through stronger password requirements?

Saying Hello to Our Single Sign-On Experience

To rethink the way employees access apps, we built an identity solution into Salesforce Platform. Salesforce customers will know it by the name Salesforce Identity, but internally we call it Aloha (get it? It means Hello!).  Salesforce Identity allows our employees to log into all 200+ apps and websites they use with a single login, creating a frictionless sign-on experience. Once we consolidated apps behind a single identity, we needed a way to protect it. Enter two-factor authentication through Salesforce Authenticator. This way, even if an employee loses his or her password, we won’t lose control of our applications. And because we have a single place to authenticate users, this was simple to deploy—we t rolled out two-factor authentication to all 200+ apps in just 40 days.

Signing On to Serious Productivity Increases

Remember how much time we said it took employees to log into all their apps and websites before Salesforce Identity? Now, all that time saved adds up to over $1MM saved in employee productivity. Want to learn how we did it? Check out the latest story in our series of interactive stories, Inside Stories: How Salesforce Uses the Salesforce Platform. The series continues today with a look at how the Salesforce Platform gave rise to our single sign-on solution Salesforce Identity, enabling us to dramatically increase employee productivity and decrease the risk of data breaches.

Salesforce really does run on Salesforce, and we’re excited to continue our interactive series of stories showcasing how we solved these challenges with the Salesforce Platform. It’s called Inside Stories: How Salesforce Uses The Salesforce Platform. This series explores eight different apps showcasing of the power and flexibility of the Salesforce Platform to solve everyday business challenges, improve employee engagement, and boost innovation.

Go inside the Salesforce’s employee app development strategy with Inside Stories. Look for more stories of apps built on the Salesforce Platform in the coming weeks.