Patent ID: 7174383

Claim:
A method to facilitate single sign-on services in a hosting environment, comprising: receiving a request from a user to access a partner application at an application server, wherein the application server is a hosting server supplying application services to multiple entities; determining if the user holds a token granting access to the partner application; and if the user does not hold the token, redirecting the request to a single sign-on server, requesting a user authentication credential from the user, receiving the user authentication credential, wherein the user authentication credential includes an entity identifier which identifies a requesting entity associated with the user to the hosting server, verifying if the user is authorized to access the partner application based on the entity identifier, and if the user is authorized to access the partner application, issuing the token to the user, wherein the token grants access to the partner application to the user, and wherein the token includes an expiry time based on data supplied from a virtual private database, wherein the virtual private database is in non-volatile storage.