Self-managed Versus Service-based SSO Solutions: Should you build your own SSO Solution?

Software-enabled alternatives are increasingly replacing analog business processes and systems, and most companies today rely on software to some degree. When you add the proliferation of integration-friendly software as a service (SaaS) solutions to this development, it’s easy to see why the average organization uses more than 200 applications. Even if one user’s workflow requires access to just 20 of these applications, logging in before accessing each app can be a real hassle. 

Single sign-on (SSO) is an effective way to streamline the login process. It enables users to gain seamless access to multiple affiliated applications or services when they sign in using one of these applications. An identity provider (IdP) authenticates the user and issues a session token to validate them when they go on to use other applications.

SSO has become an essential feature for organizations of all descriptions. It carries many potential benefits in terms of both security and convenience. However, it is not easy to create an SSO implementation, which involves acquiring tools to manage connections and building an infrastructure to run the system. And while building your own SSO solution in-house gives you flexibility and customizability, the challenges accompanying a DIY approach will leave you wondering: Should you build your own SSO solution using disparate tools or invest in a third-party service-based solution?

This section compares the benefits and challenges of building an SSO infrastructure versus using an external service-based solution.

Requirements for a DIY SSO Solution

Let’s start by examining two defining and complex tasks necessary to build your own SSO solution in-house. These are determining your infrastructure and establishing an authorization and authentication protocol.

Determine Your System’s Infrastructure

Do you need a cloud-based or on-premises solution? What kinds of systems will you be integrating with your SSO solution? On what devices is your software running? The answers to these questions will inform your requirements list, your tech stack, and the third-party solutions you might have to license. 

For example, if you’re using a hybrid-based infrastructure, you must ensure that the SSO solution you’re designing is compatible with every service in your tech stack—in both the present and future. Additionally, your tools must integrate with your cloud provider. You must find suitable, easy-to-learn alternatives if they don't.

Remember that although this process may seem like a one-time transition, you must be conscious of vendor lock-in and what compatible supplementary or replacement tools are available if you change your stack (or infrastructure) down the road. This kind of long-term planning can be challenging, but building your own SSO infrastructure requires that you closely consider the future and develop a clear security roadmap to make effective choices from the beginning.

Determine Your Solution’s Authentication and Authorization Methods

You must determine the authentication and authorization protocols for building a suitable SSO infrastructure.

You can develop a custom authentication or authorization protocol for your implementation framework. But you’re likely to run into frustrating integration challenges, perhaps even being blindsided by flaws you didn’t detect earlier. 

If you’re not building your authorization protocol, you must select from numerous pre-built frameworks, including SAML, OAuth, Web Services Federation (WS-Fed), and RADIUS. Other authentication and authorization protocols include Integrated Windows Authentication (IWA), LDAP, Kerberos, and Central Authentication Service (CAS). 

Authentication and authorization are the most critical components of your SSO solution. To best understand what protocols to adopt, you must perform thorough, specific research about which protocol to choose. You shouldn’t make this decision lightly or swiftly. So, to make an informed decision, you must invest a great deal of time exploring your top contenders, their strengths and weaknesses, and their compatibility with your infrastructure.

As you’ve seen above, building the ideal SSO infrastructure requires much thought, attention, planning, and labor. You must critically analyze your systems from end to end. With this in mind, third-party SSO providers are becoming increasingly popular, as they take away the burden of solution development, optimization, and maintenance. 

To help you determine whether to choose self-managed or service-based SSO solutions, let’s explore how these two methods compare in four critical categories: development time, costs, security, and futureproofing. 

SSO and Development Time

The more robust you want your SSO solution to be, the more challenging it is to execute. In addition to planning, assembling, and implementing your SSO solution, you may want additional features and abilities, such as the following:

• The ability to restrict certain users’ access to certain apps or add an extra layer of security over certain apps.

   

• Customizations and configurations to ensure your organization remains compliant with established industry guidelines.

   

• A logging feature that helps you track user resource access and the activities in which they are engaged.

   

• Support for your preferred authentication methods, such as multi-factor authentication, biometric input, IP address safe listing, hardware tokens, or a trusted secondary device.

   

• The ability to scale.

Implementing each feature requires significant labor and time, spread across the research, development, and training process. Therefore, while there are certainly benefits to and flexibility in building your own SSO solution, you must be prepared to spend a great deal of time simply making your solution.

Investing in an existing service-based SSO solution alleviates this significant time sink. The time you would have invested into researching and choosing an SSO infrastructure and stack is time you can spend researching a solution that meets your current — and future — needs.

With clearly identified corporate goals and policies, you can quickly choose an SSO solution that meets your organization’s security needs without having to read through a long list of providers. Additionally, you can significantly reduce the decision-making time by performing strength, weakness, opportunity, and threat (SWOT) analysis on your final contenders for the superior quality of service. 

Costs of Implementing SSO 

Because of the amount of time and development power required for building your own SSO solution, it should be no surprise that the costs of developing a solution in-house are high. Instead of outsourcing, you’re taking on that labor and must pay for that time. Additionally, the costs of building an SSO solution don’t stop when the build is complete. You also have costs associated with maintenance and updates.

Scaling cost is also an important factor to consider when deciding whether to build or buy an SSO solution. Many third-party SSO providers automatically handle scaling with little cost increases. Having to upgrade your in-house solution to an influx of users may not be sustainable in the long-term, considering the infrastructure and code base requirements.  

Handling Security 

There are severe threats if your SSO implementation falls short in security. SAML, as an XML-based language, is susceptible to several security vulnerabilities that could compromise the authentication process or lead to the theft of login credentials. For example, there were 22 OAuth vulnerabilities created on CVE in 2021 alone.

Vulnerability detection is key to maintaining a top-notch solution. If you’re not a security specialist, this can be highly challenging, even when working in a team. Thorough security implementation takes a significant amount of time and resources. And if you’re working in a highly-regulated industry, the consequences of security breaches are severe.

Procuring a third-party SSO solution takes the weight of searching for, mitigating, and handling security issues off your shoulders, freeing you up to focus on more profitable, development-centered tasks.

Even though getting an SSO solution for highly regulated industries, such as the health industry with HIPAA requirements, may sometimes come with an extra cost, it far outweighs the consequences of not having a regulatory-compliant solution. Building, testing, and optimizing an in-house SSO solution with significant security and regulatory requirements — including user privacy — is resource intensive.

Long-term Success and Support

Essentially, building an in-house solution is doable. Still, you must be aware of the attendant implementation encumbrances, including updates, ongoing maintenance, and any unexpected technical issues. You can’t simply build an SSO solution and expect it to work seamlessly forever. Maintaining the solution and troubleshooting any problems is an ongoing process — one you must continuously dedicate time and energy to for long-term success. And when issues do arise, you don’t have an SSO-specific support team on which to rely.

When you purchase a solution, your provider takes care of steps to futureproof their SSO solution, from security increases to bug updates. You can develop with the knowledge that your SSO strategy can expand and grow with your organization. And if you encounter any hiccups, your SSO provider will resolve those for you or help you solve the issue yourself.

Adopting a pre-built SSO solution like Ping Identity’s enables you to rapidly deploy a capable solution built by experts while saving time, money, and resources.

PingOne leverages the power of artificial intelligence and innovative tools to shield the high-risk areas of your system from fraudulent activities and prevent the authorization of potentially malicious actors in real-time. PingOne bolsters your security standing, so you can focus on your core business goals and channel more resources to them.

PingOne also minimizes the burden on your security team and allows them to focus on being proactive about security. With the always-on support from the SSO and IAM experts at Ping Identity, you don’t need to worry about assembling a team of identity experts before SSO implementation. We can provide the help you need to adapt your solution further to meet your unique needs.

There’s more to access administration in an organization than simply authenticating users. Giving customer support personnel access to sign a software release is an unnecessary and potentially costly security and management risk. You might also want a server management service to have more layers of security than, say, a calendar service. Building an SSO solution in-house that meets present-day standards requires a big bag of resources and patience — and a significant amount of time.

With Ping Identity, you can integrate all your identity providers and store your users’ identities with an industry-leading zero-trust protocol. You can define strict access boundaries, oversee access management through a central platform, and count on your system to remain safe and secure.