Kjell Backlund

Did you know that: Half of paid SaaS customers do not use the application at all Nine out of 10 has left an application when they forgot a password, instead of restoring it Eighty-six percent may leave a web site when asked to sign up Two out of five would rather scrub the toilet than come up with a new password These figures, based on research from Totango and Janrain in 2012, clearly show that sign-up and sign-on are major issues for any cloud application provider. If you are providing cloud applications to businesses, single sign-on must at least have been up for discussion. Like with most other challenges, there are three possible approaches you can choose between: Pretend it is not your problem Pretend you are doing something about it Do something about it Let's look at how your choice affects your business, which after all should be your guiding light. Preten... (more)

SaaS Single Sign-On: It's Time for a Lighter Approach

SaaS brings a lot of advantages to businesses - no need to invest in purchasing and maintaining licenses and infrastructure, and no need to worry about upgrades and bug fixes. Larger companies, however, face a major challenge related to user authentication and management. Larger companies have invested a lot of time and effort in improving user productivity, compliance and security, and in cutting user management costs. They have done so using technologies like single sign-on and centralized user management. SaaS applications are now challenging those efforts and threatening to b... (more)

Why SaaS Vendors Must Offer Automated Sign-On to All Business Customers

First, let's define what I mean by automated sign-on. Some call it federated sign-on, others just single sign-on. For business customers it means that they use their corporate network sign-on and user directory to manage access to an external application. Automated sign-on requires user management to be automated as well; otherwise end users do not get access automatically. Typically, automated sign-on is regarded to be something troublesome and costly, which slows down rollouts, adds complexity and requires involvement from customer IT organizations, something that SaaS vendors o... (more)

Is SAML All You Need to Offer Business Customers SaaS Single Sign-on?

No. SAML is a protocol, a language. Languages are great for communicating, but a certain language is only useful when communicating with other speakers of the same language. In business, the value of a language is dependent on how big a share of your current and potential customers speak it. Your choice of language(s) can greatly affect what kind of business you can expect: doing business only in Finnish limits your market to 5 Million people, whereas English lets you address more than a Billion people. You have three options: Limit your market to only those who speak your langu... (more)