How to Add B2B SSO (BYOI) Without a CIAM Vendor

Single Sign-On (SSO) is no longer optional for modern software providers. Whether you’re a SaaS vendor or a large enterprise delivering portals, apps, or platforms for your B2B enterprise clients, chances are your customers will demand federated B2B SSO – often with “Bring Your Own Identity” (BYOI), meaning they want to log in using their existing identity providers (Okta, Ping, Entra ID, etc.).

Traditionally, the answer has been to integrate with a Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) vendor like Auth0, Ping, Entra, Amazon Cognito or WorkOS. While these platforms are powerful, they come with significant drawbacks:

• Long implementation cycles — projects can take months, delaying customer onboarding.
• Code rewrites and SDK dependencies — you need to refactor authentication flows and maintain vendor-specific code.
• High ongoing costs — per-user pricing and platform fees add up quickly, especially at scale.

The result: slower deals, ballooning engineering costs, and frustrated customers.

The Challenge With Traditional CIAM Vendors

Let’s break down why relying on CIAM platforms isn’t always the best fit for organizations that need BYOI:

1. Long Time-to-Value Even with pre-built SDKs, integrating CIAM solutions into your application takes significant engineering work. You’ll need to design new login flows, test across identity providers, and often coordinate with your customers’ IT/security teams. For many teams, this means onboarding a new enterprise customer can take weeks or months.
2. Heavy Code Changes Most CIAM vendors require you to rewrite your authentication layer. That means swapping out login pages, handling tokens differently, and introducing SDKs that you’ll need to maintain indefinitely. For enterprises with production workloads and existing customer apps, this is disruptive and risky.
3. Costly at Scale CIAM platforms aren’t cheap. Licensing fees are typically per user, per month, and additional charges may apply for advanced features like MFA, API access, or higher SLAs. For organizations with thousands or millions of customer-facing users, costs can quickly explode.

A Better Approach: BYOI Without a CIAM Vendor

The good news? You don’t need to adopt a heavy CIAM platform to support B2B SSO and BYOI.

With a proxy-based approach, you can:

• Enable SSO for apps in hours, not months.
• Avoid rewriting authentication code — keep your existing login flows intact.
• Reduce costs by eliminating per-user CIAM fees.

Instead of embedding SDKs or rebuilding your login, a proxy sits in front of your application, handling SAML/OIDC handshakes with your customers’ identity providers. Your app only needs to trust standard headers or tokens passed downstream.

Introducing Datawiza Access Proxy

This is exactly what Datawiza Access Proxy was built for.

• It’s a lightweight, no-code reverse proxy that sits in front of your application — whether SaaS or enterprise portal.
• It handles SAML/OIDC authentication, and BYOI with your customers’ identity providers.
• It passes authenticated user attributes downstream to your app as standard headers.
• Your application doesn’t need to change its login code – it simply trusts the proxy.

How it works:

1. Your client’s identity provider authenticates the user.
2. Datawiza Access Proxy completes the handshake (SAML or OIDC).
3. The proxy injects identity attributes into the request as headers.
4. Your application receives the authenticated user context – without any code changes.

Why This Matters for Both SaaS and Enterprise Software

Whether you’re a SaaS company selling to enterprise customers or a large enterprise delivering portals or custom apps to your B2B clients, the reality is the same:

• Enterprise buyers expect BYOI. If you can’t offer it, deals stall or projects drag.
• With Datawiza, you shorten sales cycles or onboarding timelines by meeting customer security requirements immediately.
• Developers stay focused on your core product instead of IAM plumbing.
• Finance teams avoid runaway CIAM vendor fees.

Takeaway

If you need to add B2B SSO with BYOI to your applications, think twice before jumping into a CIAM vendor contract. While solutions like Auth0, Ping, Entra, or WorkOS are well-known, they often introduce delays, code rewrites, and unnecessary costs.

With Datawiza Access Proxy, organizations can: ✅ Add BYOI quickly ✅ Avoid code changes ✅ Control costs

This way, you deliver the enterprise-grade identity features your customers and clients demand – without slowing down growth.

👉 Want to see how Datawiza helps organizations enable BYOI in hours, not months? Book a demo today.