To Build or To Buy

The Cost of Not Offering Federated Identity

The inability to offer federated identity via an IAM platform like Auth0 blocks growth. Enterprise customers expect the ease and security of federated identity, and if you can’t deliver, they may take their business elsewhere. Investing in a third-party IAM solution to enable federated identity and other premium offerings
for the enterprise is a cost — but don’t forget to consider the costs of not offering these value-adds.

• Lower adoption rates: Certain customers simply won’t work with you if you don’t offer federated identity. You must be able to support any type of enterprise federation your customers ask for.
• Lost revenue: In addition to revenue loss due to lower adoption rates, not offering federated identity costs you opportunities to generate more revenue through upsells and premium offerings.
• Missed standards: Without the security and governance requirements that enterprise buyers look for, you’ll have trouble increasing adoption rates.
• Poor user experience: Without federated identity, users have the pain of remembering a username/password combination — which isn’t the most secure way of authenticating identity anyway. Supporting SSO increases security and reduces friction for customers.
• Additional support costs: Handling authentication questions and resolving customer issues places a heavy burden on your support team. The conventional wisdom is that you save $70 for every help desk call you avoid — and those costs add up quickly.