Enterprise
Single sign-on (SSO)
Authenticating once with a central provider and gaining access to multiple applications.
What Single sign-on (SSO) means
Single sign-on lets a user authenticate once, at their organisation's identity provider, and reach every connected application without signing in again. For the organisation it is a control point: one place to enforce policy, and one place to cut access off.
How it works
The value to a security team is concentration. Multi-factor policy, conditional access and de-provisioning are enforced once rather than application by application. When somebody leaves, one action removes access everywhere instead of an audit of forty accounts.
The value to a user is fewer passwords. The cost is that the identity provider becomes critical infrastructure: when it is down, everything is down, and when it is compromised, everything is compromised.
For a B2B product, SSO is usually a sales requirement rather than a user request. It appears in a security questionnaire, and the answer determines whether the deal proceeds.
The mistake people actually make
Offering SSO while leaving local password login enabled alongside it. A former employee's local account still works after the directory has removed them, which defeats the entire point of centralising access.
In Authreads
How this applies here
Enterprise federation via SAML is Planned. Hosted login, per-tenant session policy and the management API are available today.
Every capability is listed on /roadmap as Available, In progress or Planned. Nothing is described as available here that is not listed as Available there.
Guides that go deeper
- SAML SSO for B2B SaaS: what enterprise customers will ask for
- SCIM provisioning explained: automating user lifecycle for B2B
- Per-tenant SSO: routing each customer to their own identity provider
- B2B login flows: invitations, domains, SSO and the first admin
- Identity for B2B SaaS: what the product needs at each stage
Related terms
SAML
An XML-based federation standard, still the default for enterprise single sign-on.
SCIM
System for Cross-domain Identity Management — a standard API for provisioning and de-provisioning users automatically.
Hosted login
A sign-in page served by the identity provider, which the application redirects to.
Building on any of this?
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