Getting started with Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) — especially for B2B SaaS apps — can be intimidating. What began as a fairly straightforward login box has grown into a comprehensive set of capabilities encompassing authentication, authorization, user lifecycle management, federation, and Identity security — all of which must comply with a daunting array of ever-evolving regulations and standards.
At the same time, there’s no substitute for learning through hands-on experience. But the reality is that devs are already under enough time constraints and don’t always have the luxury of building sandboxes or proofs-of-concept from scratch.
That’s why we’re excited to unveil SaaStart, a reference B2B SaaS application built using Next.js and Auth0 by Okta.
Intended primarily for developers building B2B SaaS apps, SaaStart provides a fast, safe, and accessible way for devs to explore, experiment, and get up and running with Customer Identity. You can easily deploy a sample Auth0 template from within the SaaStart GitHub repository.
Get Hands-on with Customer Identity
In Identity terms, essential features of an effective B2B CIAM solution include:
- User registration, to create the record that makes everything else possible
- Authentication, to establish with confidence that the users logging into accounts are who they say they are, using one or more factors to do so
- Authorization, to help organizations provide a user with the appropriate level of access to resources or applications
- Delegated administration, to enable customers and administrators to make updates and changes to users’ data and access
But — just as describing a car as a combination of engine, drivetrain, wheels, and steering mechanism is woefully insufficient at capturing what you can do with one or how to build one — simply summarizing these Identity elements doesn’t come close to telling the CIAM story.
To help fill in the blanks with practical experience, SaaStart allows devs to explore CIAM within the look, feel, and functionality of a modern B2B SaaS application.
Using SaaStart, devs can get hands-on with:
- Multi-tenant access control, including administrative roles with control over the app’s configuration
- Log-in options for the modern extended workforce, including Single Sign-On (SSO) for enterprise employees and email-based authentication for early adopters and smaller customers without their own Identity Providers
- Security policies, from enforcing a range of Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) options and domain-based SSO to configuring session timeouts
User provisioning, including just-in-time provisioning or automated user management using the System for Cross-Domain Identity Management (SCIM) - coming soon
API client management with self-service create/delete capabilities - coming soon
Everything Developers Need to Implement Customer Identity
SaaStart is just a taste of what’s possible with Auth0 by Okta.
With 10+ years as a pioneer in the CIAM space, we’ve leveraged cutting-edge technologies and architectures to create a modern solution with an impressive collection of features and functions.
Whether you’re building a B2C, B2B, or Hybrid application, Auth0 provides the foundational requirements out of the box with broad support for open standards and a range of developer resources — including Quickstarts, APIs, and 30+ SDKs.
In fact, with a few lines of code, you can integrate Auth0 into any app written in any language and any framework.
Plus, we’re proud to offer a number of discounted offerings that can help you get started and — thanks to a long list of features — are often sufficient for the longer term:
- Self-service options, including a free trial plan that lets you get off the ground with up to 7,500 active users and unlimited logins — while also including social login, DB connection for securely storing Identity information, branded login, extensibility, and security capabilities (brute force and suspicious IP throttling), support for five regions (US, UK, EU, JP, AUS), and even passkeys
- Auth0 for Startups, which brings the convenience and security of Auth0 to eligible startup customers so they can focus on their core value propositions rather than spending more time than is necessary on Identity
- Our Nonprofit Offering, which provides preferential pricing that makes the leading Identity service even more accessible to organizations on a mission to make the world a better place
Speed up Time-to-Market with Auth0
We understand that developers would rather spend their time solving hard problems and leveraging their creative side to build really fun solutions. Auth0 enables you to do those by offloading some of the more mundane and frankly dull parts of creating a standards-based CIAM solution.
And there’s ample evidence that outsourcing Customer Identity is the prudent approach. For instance, Okta’s 2023 report How Development Teams Purchase SaaS revealed that:
- Authentication takes the third-most time and work to build and maintain in-house, behind only “data management and storage” and “DevOps tooling and automation.”
- Third-party authentication reduces time to market more than any other SaaS component — 88% of organizations that use a third-party SaaS platform for authentication report reducing time to market
We invite you to visit our Developer Center to learn about Auth0, explore tutorials, download code samples, connect with us, find resources, and more.
If you have feedback about SaaStart or suggest other features to explore in future versions or new apps, please drop us a comment or open an issue on the GitHub repo.
