What technology should a company implement to enable Single Sign-On (SSO) capabilities for secure authentication across multiple cloud-based applications?

The implementation of Single Sign-On (SSO) capabilities enables users to authenticate once and gain access to multiple applications without the need to log in again for each one. The correct technology to support this functionality is OAuth.

OAuth is a protocol that allows one service to access resources from another service on behalf of a user. Although primarily designed for authorization, it can also facilitate SSO by allowing one login at an identity provider, which can then be used to authenticate users to various applications. With OAuth, users can leverage their existing accounts on the identity provider to streamline access to different applications securely.

The context of the other technologies provides clarity on why they do not fit the SSO requirement in this scenario. SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) is a separate framework that enables SSO by allowing secure exchange of authentication and authorization data between parties, often used in enterprise environments, but it might not be as straightforward in cloud-based applications compared to OAuth. OpenID Connect is built on top of OAuth, providing added authentication capabilities, and could also facilitate SSO, but it is specifically OAuth that underpins much of the modern web's authorization and is widely utilized for this purpose. LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) is primarily used for directory services and user