Arizona Moves Toward Single Sign-On

In recent years, government has been talking about the move toward single sign-on: one username and password that would give staff and residents alike access to all the services they need, from permitting to licenses to tax payments.

While in some cases the vision of single sign-on has been easier said than done, at the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) annual conference in San Diego, Arizona CIO Morgan Reed discussed two critical ways in which his state is moving toward this method of identity management.

Internally, Arizona is in the process of instituting an enterprise cloud email system. Once that’s in place, Reed said, likely summer 2019, they will push that same sign-on to other cloud systems, creating an extra layer of security.



On the citizen side, single sign-on work is in progress as part of a larger modernization project at the Motor Vehicle Division. Arizonans want their government to be easier to access, or, as Reed put it, “Citizens don’t care how government works, they just want it to work.” Ideally, that single identity would eventually push out to other state applications.