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Should You Build or Buy B2B SaaS SSO?

Don’t struggle to build this critical capability only to find you don’t support your potential customers’ identity platform of choice. Datawiza offers a No-Code approach to supporting every identity solution.

If you’re selling your SaaS application to businesses, you’ve got to see security through the eyes of your customers. Sure, you’re doing everything you can to build security into your product, but that’s not the only challenge your potential customers have. They’re also thinking about their own Zero Trust architecture, and this includes Zero Trust for their applications.  A key strategy they’ve adopted is using a modern identity management platform like Azure AD or Okta, which includes single sign-on (SSO) and multi-factor authentication (MFA), and it’s critical for them to bring their new SaaS applications into this environment.

If you want your product to appeal to the greatest number of potential buyers, you need to support ALL the identity platforms they may be using. And Identity-platform-based SSO isn’t the only log-in scenario potential customers may demand. To meet the needs of their customer bases, many companies are now implementing a mix of strategies, including username/password, SSO, social login, and passwordless – and they will likely want to keep adding new strategies as they emerge. If you can’t support their needs – especially if your competition does – you risk lost sales.

So being able to support every log-in scenario – the Log-in Your Way imperative – has to be seen as a critical feature of every mature product. In fact, to maximize the interest in a new product, Log-in Your Way should be a foundational capability of the minimum viable product (MVP) you use to engage your potential audience. So there’s no decision around “if” you will support all identity platforms and what the timeline should be for that support. The only question is “how” you can support them from Day 1. 

 A classic choice: Build the connections yourself? Is there a No-Code Buy option?

Once you’ve accepted the Log-in Your Way imperative, you must figure out how to implement it and how you charge for it. It’s a balancing act. Do you make it a core feature and offer it for free? Or do you make it a premium feature? Do you think about it from your business point of view or from your customer’s point of view?

From a purely business perspective, if you’ve got a team of developers and not a lot of cash, your first thought is likely to have your dev team find the fastest, cheapest way to get started using open source tools and SDKs. This could end up being an expensive mistake.

Even if you have some cash to burn, you just can’t build support for every identity platform fast enough for your customers. Besides, you likely don’t have the type of security expertise and training required to ensure you are delivering a bullet-proof and future-proof Zero Trust solution for every identity provider.

An informal poll of SaaS vendors asked, “How much engineering time was spent on building enterprise SSO support?” (Meaning support all major identity providers, like Okta/Auth0, Microsoft Azure AD, Google workspace, Ping, ForgeRock, & OneLogin.) The result showed that 45% required more than 3 months of engineering time, and 22% required more than 6 months.

saas vendor statistic

Fortunately, there’s now a Buy approach that can save you time and money, while ensuring your solution appeals to the widest possible audience. Datawiza is the industry’s first No-Code platform for implementing authentication and authorization for applications and APIs. It lets you immediately enable customers of multi-tenant SaaS applications to log in using the SSO credentials provided by whatever identity solution they use – Microsoft Azure AD, Okta/Auth0, Amazon, Google and more. You can also centrally manage access for all your customers across the multi-tenant infrastructure from a central location.

So with Datawiza in mind, let’s look at the pros and cons of the Build vs. Buy approaches.

Build vs. Buy with Datawiza

 

Build your own SSO connections

With the Datawiza Platform

Time to market

Take months to support each new identity platform

Support every identity platform on Day 1

Revenue potential

Experience delayed revenue or lost sales if support for an identity platform isn’t available

Immediately support every potential customer’s identity platform of choice

Competition

Incrementally add support for each identity solution as new client demands require

Announce and support a robust all-encompassing B2B SS0 solution at launch

Developer Focus/No-code

Require developers to understand SDKs and APIs and run a custom integration project for each identity platform

Leverage a no-code approach to keep developers focused on application-specific features

Security

Risk inadvertently coding in security vulnerabilities during the development process, devote significant time to testing

Rely on a proven solution built by security experts

Implementation process

Continue to rely on the time- and resource-consuming code – test – fix – release development lifecycle

Just pay a small monthly fee based on actual user access and launch within days.

Additional Resource costs

Pay high fees for required technical knowledge, including security, security auditing and cryptography expertise

Rely on a robust and security solution that was built by experts and proven in the market.

Future-proof

Maintain a specialized team of engineers to track and support constantly evolving access management best practices

Ensure your solution automatically supports all identity platforms as they continue to evolve and improve

The post Should You Build or Buy B2B SaaS SSO? appeared first on Datawiza.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Industry Archives - Datawiza authored by Claudia Arnett. Read the original post at: https://www.datawiza.com/blog/industry/b2b-saas-sso-build-vs-buy/