No More User Management Mess?

SaaS is great.  No more having to worry about buying, configuring, deploying and maintaining software on premise, no more vendor lock-ins (in theory), no more waiting for years to get new functionality deployed.  Great!  Not everything is perfect however.  One of the nasty side effects of transition to SaaS is that each SaaS platform implements its own user management.  If you only use one SaaS service, that might be manageable, however as the number of SaaS services expands, managing user accounts across all these services (not to mention not having a single way to enforce login policies) becomes a major nightmare.

The good news is that a new crop of Cloud-based Identity Providers has come up to solve the problem.  They range from Microsoft Azure Directory Services, to  Amazon's version, to Okta which extends the enterprise Active Directory (or other LDAP services) to the cloud, to One Login, which bills itself as an SSO for SaaS.  It's exciting to watch this non-trivial problem being solved in creative and innovative ways.

A service that we've been working on (*association disclaimer) aims to not only provide SSO for SaaS, but also to unify the authentication policies across all SaaS services, as well as help finance folks manage the seat-based cost of SaaS is KoalaSSO.  Sign up for Beta if you are considering moving your IDP infrastructure into the cloud and/or facing the user management across SaaS challenge.