TL;DR: Okta has launched the Okta Customer Identity Cloud, powered by Auth0, with support for two use cases: Consumer Apps and SaaS Apps. This article explores the SaaS Apps use case and capabilities, as well as how product and engineering leaders can accelerate growth with an identity solution built for business customers.
The Software as a Service (SaaS) market is booming, with new products coming online every day. The average number of apps companies use increased to 89 this year, with as many as 187 for larger companies, according to Okta’s Businesses at Work 2022 report.
All of this growth has created intense competition in the SaaS space. The companies that will win are the ones who can successfully onboard business customers quickly and move upmarket while remaining hyper-focused on their core product.
In identity and access management terms, this is called customer identity: Learning about your customers and securely building consent-based trust by understanding who they are and how they want to engage with you.
Historically, there have been very limited customer identity options on the market for the SaaS use case, and product and engineering leaders end up using some combination of consumer and workforce identity solutions.
What if you didn’t have to use baling wire and duct tape? Could identity help you capture your market opportunity–instead of slowing you down?
Customer Identity for SaaS Apps, Simplified
Okta Customer Identity Cloud for SaaS Apps enables every app builder to become enterprise-ready and accelerate growth without having to become an identity expert. SaaS-specific capabilities like Enterprise Federation, Delegated Administration, Multi-factor Authentication (MFA), custom branding, and security features are available out of the box. And our robust identity product roadmap means we’re constantly innovating for you, too.
“Kandji is committed to being a pioneer in the future of work by helping companies manage their Apple devices at scale,” said Weldon Dodd, senior vice president of Product Strategy at Kandji. “Delivering the best experience for our customers means making onboarding as slick as possible, managing and customizing workflows, and providing the most secure experience from both an administrator and end-user perspective. We did all of this with Okta Customer Identity Cloud four times as fast as our DIY solution. And it’s working–we’re already seeing customer revenue trending up.”
Here are a few of the ways our customers, like Kandji, Blackboard, and TripActions, are using SaaS Apps today.
Acquire and Onboard New Customers
As your business scales, you want to streamline the onboarding process to your applications, so business customers can start using your product quickly and collaborating with their coworkers. This increases your “stickiness.” With our APIs and SDKs, you can build Self-Service Onboarding directly into your application so that your customers can provision access control, set up Single Sign-On (SSO), and invite other members of their organization without burdening your engineering team.
Personalize Experiences For Your Customers
Technical teams can spend weeks configuring identity manually for each new customer, with lots of back-and-forths to implement changes. Organizations is our toolset that helps SaaS companies manage and model identity for business customers as organizations (under a single tenant). It allows you to provide last-mile customization on a per-organization basis to ensure the authentication experience meets their needs, including enterprise federation with any source, account provisioning, onboarding and migration flows, customized branding, and security policies that meet the most stringent requirements.
Achieve On-Demand Security
Credential stuffing accounts for 34% of overall login traffic and outpaces normal traffic in some countries (61%) in the U.S. and verticals (more than 80% in retail), according to Okta’s 2022 State of Secure Identity Report. Attack protection with Credential Guard and Bot Detection enables you to secure the data of your business customers, and help prevent the most common identity-based attacks. We take the burden of managing identity security off your internal teams, so they can focus on shipping new features for your product.
Customize Authentication For Complex Use Cases
No two business customers are the same, and there will be frequent requests to customize your platform for complex use cases. Extensibility–custom code blocks and extensibility points that allow for secure customization at any point in the authentication pipeline–has long been an Auth0 differentiator and is now available through Okta Customer Identity Cloud. And because we maintain the extensibility framework, you can meet unique authentication needs and confidently check off RFP requirements today, with adaptability for tomorrow.
Become Enterprise Ready and Scale
Your customer identity platform should help you grow and land larger customers more often. With SaaS Apps, customer requirements around SSO and MFA are available out of the box. Coupled with cloud choice across AWS and Azure, regional infrastructure for data residency, and our 99.99% SLA, you can grow your business anywhere in the world, one login at a time–without needing to host, manage, or scale an identity solution yourself.
What’s New for SaaS Apps?
New product innovations for SaaS Apps, announced at Oktane22, are now available for all Okta customers:
- Okta Workforce Enterprise Connection: Okta Workforce Enterprise Connection makes it easy for SaaS app builders to offer out-of-the-box integrations to Okta Workforce Identity Cloud, providing end-users with a seamless and trustworthy login experience. This enterprise connection is included on all Enterprise and B2B self-service plans for no additional charge and is now easier to discover and configure for SaaS Apps use cases.
- Organizations Enhancements: To support our customer's business growth, Organizations now support greater scalability with up to two million organizations per user (tenant) and two million members per organization. We have also made it easier to search for organizations within the Manage Dashboard, making it even easier to find and administer those millions of business customers in your multi-tenant application.
Ready to accelerate your business with identity? Learn more about Okta Customer Identity Cloud for SaaS Apps at https://www.okta.com/customer-identity.
About the author
Shiven Ramji
President, Customer Identity Cloud
Shiv is an experienced product executive and builder obsessed with creating beautiful products. He is the President of Customer Identity at Okta, managing a $1B ARR business and overseeing the company’s product, data, security, and technology strategy and execution. Before Auth0 and Okta, Shiv was the SVP of Product at DigitalOcean, leading DigitalOcean’s products, pricing, and partnerships. Additionally, Shiv has held product leadership positions at global brands, including Amazon, NBCUniversal, LiveIntent, and The Nielsen Company. Shiv was the recipient of the 2023 Top Global CPO Award by the Products That Count community.
Beyond his current corporate focus, Shiv is deeply committed to fostering entrepreneurship and innovation, particularly in Africa. He is an active angel investor and startup advisor and also serves on the boards of Products That Count and Aiven.io.