Many companies are faced with the decision of vertical integration in which they want to implement single sign-on (SSO). Central solutions are often too expensive for individual projects, while self-developed solutions have serious disadvantages in the long term. The following aspects should be considered when making an architecture decision:
- Building your own adapters can tie up your development team’s time and resources, which are then lost for professional development.
- The finished adapters require additional bandwidth for ongoing maintenance and troubleshooting.
- Every new or updated service provider has to go through a thorough security check because each service provider has its own target.
- Adapters do not protect the service provider from the dangers of the underlying platform such as insecure SSL implementations.
- The impact of SSO implementation on performance and scalability must be taken into account for each individual service provider.
The decentralized architecture requires strict governance, otherwise it can lead to potential inconsistencies in different environments and can result in significant maintenance efforts.
