You know the drill. You're evaluating a new tool for your company. There's a nice self-serve tier. A mid-tier with more features. And then... Enterprise. "Call for pricing."
And right there, every single time, behind the enterprise gate: Single Sign-On.
Bundled alongside higher SLAs, tier-one support, advanced analytics — features that genuinely cost more to deliver and maintain. SSO just... rides along.
Some CFO 15 years ago had the brilliant idea to make SSO the forcing function for enterprise contracts, and now it's industry standard. Every SaaS vendor does it.
SSO is table stakes for building a scalable IT organization.
It's not a luxury. It's not "enterprise complexity." It's how you:
- Onboard and offboard people safely
- Maintain a sane security posture
- Keep your audit trail clean
- Avoid the password sprawl nightmare
SSO is not expensive to build or maintain. The protocols are mature. The identity providers do the heavy lifting. This isn't like guaranteeing 99.99% uptime, which requires real infrastructure investment, or staffing a support team.
This matters even more now. We're entering an agentic world where your systems need to talk to other organizations' systems. Identity and authentication are the foundation. Making that foundation pay-to-play slows everyone down.
I realize I'm shouting into the void here. So genuine question for this audience:
How do we actually move the needle on this? Besides yelling into the LinkedIn void? In researching this I found sso.tax — which is awesome — props to them.
I think the entire industry benefits if we make this change. I just don't know who goes first.