Updated on January 29, 2024
Single sign-on (SSO) solutions are a popular category within the identity and access management (IAM) sector.
With that, interest in two categories of SSO is rising above the rest: cloud-based single sign-on and open-source single sign-on.
Up to in the SaaS industry report that they are planning to adopt cloud SaaS. On top of that, average small and medium businesses use 102 and 137 different apps, respectively, and spending growth is outpacing the number of .
These stats lead to two conclusions:
1. Whether they know it or not, IT admins need cloud-based SSO solutions to help securely manage user access to all of these applications.
2. Single sign-on solutions can get extremely pricey, so it鈥檚 no wonder IT organizations are searching for open-source single sign-on alternatives.
Is Open-Source Single Sign-On (SSO) Worth It?
The overall concept of SSO has been extremely valuable to IT admins over the years. Many single sign-on solutions have hit the market and evolved to fit in with today鈥檚 modern IT environment.
Single sign-on provides organizations with improved security, increased room for productivity among end-users, and less login friction and frustration.
One popular SSO solution on the market is web application SSO. While it does its job well, web app SSO only helps IT centralize user access to one pocket of resources: web applications. Single sign-on platforms out there have been built around this notion of web app SSO, meaning that standalone or open-source SSO solutions might not be the best for an IT environment that houses networks, file servers, systems, legacy apps, or anything else that鈥檚 not a web app.
After all, IT admins want to connect their users to everything that they need with one set of credentials, not just web apps. To understand this further, we need to step back and take a look at the problem the web-app SSO was created to solve.