When Your First Enterprise Customer Asks for SSO
By The Alt Auth Team
There is a predictable moment in a B2B product’s life: a deal is going well, procurement gets involved, and someone asks whether you support SSO. The honest answer is usually no, and the follow-up question — how long would it take — is where teams get into trouble by guessing.
What the customer is really asking
They are asking whether their IT department can control access to your product from the place they control everything else. When an employee leaves, they want that person out of your app without opening your app. That is the requirement. SAML is just the common way of satisfying it.
What it involves
- Per-customer identity provider configuration — certificates, endpoints, attribute mapping.
- A way to route a user to the right provider, usually by email domain.
- Just-in-time provisioning, so a first-time SSO user becomes an account without an invite.
- A fallback path for the customer’s own admins when the provider is misconfigured.
- Ongoing support: certificates expire, and they expire on a customer’s schedule, not yours.
“SSO is not a build-once feature. It is a build-once feature plus a permanent support surface.”
If you are one deal away from needing it, buying is almost always cheaper than building. Microsoft OAuth and one SSO / SAML connection are included on the Business plan in Alt Auth, with full white-label and a dedicated contact on Enterprise.