The industry trend toward outsourcing software components to SaaS providers is undeniable. And more applications are becoming disaggregated, API-driven, distributed, and cloud-hosted. Software is indeed eating the world. And SaaS is eating the software.
In fact, more businesses than ever are identifying opportunities where in-house, custom-written software components that are not a core-competency are now being fronted by APIs, and then outsourced to cloud services.
In our latest 2020 State of Application Assembly survey results, we at Auth0 found that indeed, rather than build everything in-house, the majority of development teams are turning to best-in-class SaaS services in a number of specific use cases.
What Did We Learn?
We wanted to sample teams actively considering outsourcing SaaS services like payment processing, authentication, security, messaging services, and others - and better understand the who, how, and when they did so. With such broad adoption of cloud services, some companies may still be hesitant to turn to SaaS for what they consider business-critical functions — even when those functions are not core competencies of their team.
We investigated the number of apps built per team, who the apps are built for, which apps are commonly used based on company size, and the relative use-cases of top SaaS services.
Overall:
- We saw a small, but significant, percentage of product managers and security team members still building their own apps.
- Regardless of company size or team size, 51% of teams were responsible for two to five applications and 27% were responsible for more than five.
- More than 75% of apps built were built for externally-facing audiences.
- Dev teams tended to rely on SaaS largely for payments, messaging, data augmentation, and authentication, helping them to focus on their own differentiated core products.
How You Can Learn More:
The complete survey report is available free-of-charge on Auth0.com - More relevant information you might also find useful:
- Build vs. Buy: Guide to Evaluating Identity Management
- Do Identity Right – So Your Digital Business Strategy Succeeds
- Auth0 Identity on AWS
About Auth0
Auth0 by Okta takes a modern approach to customer identity and enables organizations to provide secure access to any application, for any user. Auth0 is a highly customizable platform that is as simple as development teams want, and as flexible as they need. Safeguarding billions of login transactions each month, Auth0 delivers convenience, privacy, and security so customers can focus on innovation. For more information, visit https://auth0.com.
