If you’re a SaaS vendor, you want to make it easy for your enterprise customers to log into the system and access services. However, the rise of Single Sign-On (SSO) has introduced a new challenge to this.
Over the last few years, SSO has become a mainstay of enterprise managing IT’s approach to user access to applications. SSO reduces password fatigue, while enabling IT to easily manage and track user access to sensitive information to support security and compliance requirements.
Today, your customers and potential customers are implementing SSO via an identity solution such as Microsoft Azure AD, Okta, Amazon or Google, and it’s no surprise they want to leverage these solutions to log into your SaaS application.
If you have already attempted to connect your SaaS application to an identity management solution, you know how costly and time-consuming it can be. Doing this for multiple platforms is time and cost prohibitive.
SaaS application vendors that serve business customers (a business-to-business or B2B model) rely on a multi-tenant architecture. This architecture allows the vendor to optimize cost while ensuring security by maintaining multiple instances of its applications in a physically shared environment while keeping each customer’s data secure in a separate “tenant.”
Enabling each business customer to log into this shared environment using the SSO capabilities of their specific identity solution is often referred to as B2B SSO.
- Position your SaaS application as enabling a Zero Trust journey for your customers
- Generate positive publicity by advancing the security needs of your customers
- Reduce your need to manage, store, secure and audit identity data
- Offer SSO as a premium service or differentiate your product by bundling SSO
- Offer the advanced authentication features of identity solutions without implementing them yourself
- Future-proof your applications
When enterprises can’t log into your SaaS application using their identity solution of choice, they lose control and visibility into the accounts users are creating. This leads to the potential for uncontrolled costs and compliance violations. Individual users become frustrated at having to maintain a separate username and password. Many enterprises will insist on SSO access before adopting your solution, so your inability to seamlessly connect with different identity platforms may be costing you sales. By enabling SSO, you can use security as a selling point and position your application as enabling Zero Trust for your customers.
Since you already have developers and tools, you might consider trying to DIY the connections between your multi-tenant SaaS application and the various identity solutions. However, it can take considerable time and resources – weeks or even months – to establish a seamless and secure connection to just one identity solution. Developers need to master modern security protocols, such as OIDC and SAML, and the identity provider’s SDKs/APIs, and then write and test the integration code. The entire effort needs to be repeated for each identity solution your current and potential customers are using. Plan on keeping these developers around to maintain and upgrade the code. This is why many SaaS vendors are charging exorbitant fees for the “privilege” of SSO access – which is now essential for customers of all sizes.
When your developers enable a connection with an identity solution, they must ensure they don’t inadvertently introduce new security vulnerabilities that could impact your application or your customers. But understanding the security nuances of the connection between a multi-tenant SaaS application and an identity solution in our rapidly evolving cyber risk environment requires a true expert. If you don’t have the security expertise on staff, you will need to hire someone or rely on an expensive consultant.
The security environment is dynamic and rapidly evolving. The solutions your customers use today may change tomorrow – and new solutions with new protocols will likely be introduced in the future. By trying to maintain the connections between your multi-tenant SaaS application and new identity solutions yourself, you are creating an ongoing and costly management scenario that will constantly distract and drain your development resources.
Enter the Datawiza Access Management Platform
Datawiza, the industry’s first No-Code platform for implementing authentication and authorization for applications and APIs, lets you immediately enable customers of your multi-tenant SaaS application to log in using the SSO credentials provided by whatever identity solution they choose to use. Cloud-native Datawiza, an Access Management as a Service (AMaaS) platform, supports every identity solution, including Microsoft Azure AD, Okta/Auth0, Amazon, Google and more. By doing so, Datawiza enables SaaS vendors to centrally manage access for all customers across the multi-tenant infrastructure from a central location – all with the security protocols customers need, including policy-defined, URL-level access controls based on detailed user and device attributes, such as group, role, IP or browser. Offer SSO to your customers for free or as a premium service. The choice is yours. No coding required.
