5 Key Factors to Consider for your Auth Flow - Build vs. Buy

Authentication is the means of verifying that someone logging in to your application is the person they claim to be.

And if you are struggling to quantify the value of building software in-house versus purchasing an external SaaS platform when it comes to your authentication flow, evaluate these 5 key factors 

Cost of Engineering

Implementing your own authentication always gives more control to the process and helps in customizing as per your need. But that comes with the hundreds of hours of effort of your best techies to spend. Which otherwise could have been spent building the app features your customers are eagerly waiting for. It’s a known fact that engineering projects often go beyond the initial estimated time and budget. Moreover, the cost of building a secure app and the maintenance costs can’t be ignored.  

Integrating a 3rd party Plug-n-Play authentication is like flipping a switch, which saves hundreds of hours of development efforts without maintenance overhead and worrying about cost overrun. 

‍Security Best Practices‍

Security is one of the key aspects of building any authentication solution. You need to spend enough time and resources understanding the standards like OAuth, OpenID connect, PKCE, WebAuthn, and architecting your solution to meet the security standards. On top of it, keeping up with evolving standards, best practices, and constantly patching security bugs takes time and money away from your core business. Compliance and regulation changes play a significant role in keeping your application aligned to the guidelines. 

On the other hand, a SaaS solution provider takes on the responsibilities of keeping up with the standards, securing your data be it at rest or in transit, in turn ensuring you get a secure solution right out of the box. Passwordless solutions reduce the attack surface that addresses concerns about credentials theft. It’s much easier for a SaaS application to keep itself up-to-date with industry trends and potential vulnerabilities without impacting the consuming applications. SaaS providers keep the compliance and regulatory norms up to date, so you don’t need to worry about it further.

User Experience

Many times, there is an ongoing battle between security and user experience. The digital footprints are increasing at a rapid pace, with Personal smartphones and tablets being everywhere. Companies, to be successful need to provide an omnichannel user experience, protecting and securely authenticating their users across a wide variety of devices and platforms.  

Whereas a SaaS-based authentication platform provides a user-friendly, consistent, and frictionless signup and login experience across all applications, regardless of browser or device. It also helps gather more data about users, which helps businesses to draw insights about growth, churn, adoption, and upsell opportunities. 

Integration 

One key tick mark when looking out for 3rd party products is the ease of integration with your solution to cut down development time. A solution that offers SDKs, robust documentation, powerful APIs, and features that are simple to configure and enable. 

Scale 

As the business expands, the user volume increases so as the transactions for your app. The authentication system demands a more flexible option. A SaaS solution is built to scale to as many authentication requests as needed to maintain high performance and availability. 

Secqure offers Passwordless  authentication as a service which

• Reduces your engineering costs drastically with the economy of scale 
• Delightful Login experience for your users with custom branding and advanced CSS 
• Security built-in following industry best open standards like OAuth 2.0, PKCE and FIDO2 WebAuthn 
• Plug-n-Play authentication with SDKs and powerful APIs which can be integrated with any Web or Mobile app in less than 15 min. Developers love our documentation which is written in DIY mode, with code snippets and examples from GitHub.
•  Secqure is built to scale with 99.9% uptime. You don’t need to worry about your users' growth and availability.

Password-based authentication system is a painful experience for the user’s journey. Modern applications need a passwordless solution to remove this friction. The experience should be delightful throughout be it onboarding, checkout or any activities users are performing over the internet.

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