It’s not uncommon to have fits of rage when technology fails us in ways we just couldn’t predict, because, why should we when we are always told about how it will make our lives easier.
I personally always thought that SSO was and still is a bad idea, especially now that we have more sophisticated tools to help manage the security of our online accounts and it is an especially bad idea when it is forced upon us with no other options, such as signing up for gMail and then having no other option for YouTube if you wanted to use that same email or same domain as part of the log in credentials…
So as a start-up and against my better judgement I went with Google Workspaces (GW), to manage everything that I was going across personal devices, Box, USB drives and other things and committed to sorting it all and getting it into GW and it was also a way to manage a couple of tasks that I needed to sort out at the same time. It all made sense, at the time!
I set about this task and in the process, I updated all my security and passwords as well as adding a security token to various services and some 2FA on others where it wasn’t possible to do so and this included the social media I had at the time.
But every administrative change I needed to do in GW to automate something, broke something else and caused more and more hours of work to actually correct and I would naively assume that that was that.
I had in essence become very disillusioned with Google Workspaces and committed to moving everything to Microsoft 365 and looked at what they offered for the various packages and also found that I could unify other services such as Email and DNS record hosting, domain management and the sheer plethora of email addresses and services I could use without incurring additional costs sort of blew my mind and the ease of doing so was also welcome too.
So, I committed to the change and backed up GW data and off I went, there were some hiccups with the migration but despite that MS support always got back to me within an hour and that was online chat, where as GW always pointed me to self service articles that never addressed what I needed and after about 4 days is when I could speak to someone. Given the same cost of these comparative office suites and support services, the actual customer/tenant service was a vastly different experience.
But that’s where Michael Googlé’s the ghost Workspaces past decided to bless upon me the curse of SSO and it’s a lazy solution to an undeserving question, especially when you consider the number of companies that have been compromised due to lazy security implementations where SSO was at the heart of data management.
After about a stress induced week, peppered with the occasional dark and stormy, I thought that a social media post was in order and I went to sign in using SSO.
Just what fresh hell was going on, I could log in but I got these insane messages about how the tenancy is suspended and that I have to update all the security and change the email address and the phone numbers, the security keys and 2FA’s and this was across everything that I had used Google for SSO, especially those where I had been forced into using Google SSO.
I snapped, %$*# this. Everything that was SSO that was no longer needed, was removed and deleted. Then for those that I could get into but not gain full control of I deleted and waited 2 days to recreate and thankfully that worked. It’s the only Google ‘crowd sourced’ help article that I found that was useful.
Here, I learnt some awesome things along the way…
- Don’t neglect your framework, decide what’s important to you and your skill set and stick to it
- Security is important, dedicate time properly to what you are doing in case things change
- Don’t second guess yourself for the sake of a few dollars during your bootstrapping phase
- Cortisol (stress hormone), can drive you do a lot of things, but can ruin your mental health when it becomes overwhelming
- My Proof of Concept, worked when I needed it to work to help manage my stress and anxiety
I need to rebuild my user lists and support for what I am doing and invite you to try it and if it makes you feel better, register your support.