While using multiple Cognos applications, it may be irritating to provide credentials to each application. Rather, providing credentials to one application and also using them in other trusted applications can also save time. For this, the famous Single Sign-on (SSO) is used. When SSO is active, the prompt for authentication does not appear, but users are logged in automatically. SSO for the IBM Cognos components can be achieved by configuring the External Identity mapping property. For more information on this, the IBM Cognos official manual, Installation and Configuration, may be referred to as SSO has many options for configuration.