Solving authorization for B2B SaaS at Okta

Our vision for addressing the critical gaps in B2B SaaS authorization

Remember when building authentication was a custom job for every app? A decade ago, home-grown authentication was the norm. Today, thanks to standards like OpenID Connect and SAML, and services built upon them, developers rarely build auth from scratch anymore.

Authorization, however, is lagging behind. Most companies still rely on homegrown systems, often starting with simple Role-Based Access Control. While sufficient initially, this approach quickly becomes a bottleneck. As applications scale and customer demands grow more complex, authorization logic becomes deeply embedded in application code, which hinders innovation and introduces risk.

The challenges for homegrown authorization solutions

Building and maintaining robust authorization is really hard. B2B SaaS developers face significant hurdles:

• Security risks: Three of OWASP’s top 10 vulnerabilities in 2023 were authorization-related, demonstrating that home-grown authorization implementations do not provide adequate security.
• Collaboration complexity: B2B SaaS apps need fine-grained resource sharing, team workspaces, and resource-specific permissions. Implementing these in home-grown systems is hard. It usually requires writing application code that retrieves data from multiple data sources (identity providers, databases, services), which degrades performance and adds additional load to those systems. 
• Enterprise control demands: Customers expect IT and security teams to manage permissions via identity governance tools like Okta Identity Governance. Integrating home-grown authorization systems with identity governance products is very difficult, if even feasible.
• Audit and monitoring gaps: Integrating with SIEMs for comprehensive logging of access requests and permission changes is crucial for threat detection and forensic analysis, but often an afterthought in custom systems.
• Maintaining security posture: Businesses need continuous visibility into who has access to what, using tools like Okta Identity Security Posture Management
• AI agent access: As AI agents become increasingly integrated, they must strictly adhere to user permissions, demanding fine-grained, API-driven authorization checks. 
• Performance at scale: B2B SaaS applications handle massive volumes of authorization checks. Systems must deliver low latency and high availability under pressure.

Addressing these challenges is essential to enabling users to securely access any B2B SaaS application. It starts with building an enterprise-grade application authorization layer — one that can integrate seamlessly with the broader identity and security ecosystem.

Auth0 Fine-Grained Authorization

Okta's solution is Auth0 Fine-Grained Authorization (Auth0 FGA), purpose-built to tackle these modern challenges:

• Reduces security risk: Provides a centralized, flexible, developer-friendly service, minimizing the chance of introducing vulnerabilities.
• Centralizes authorization decisions: Centralizes data for low-latency checks to allow movement of authorization logic out of application code. This enables granular permissions for collaboration and AI agent scenarios without performance hits.
• Accelerates developer adoption: Provides a managed Dashboard, a model definition language that enables multiple teams to collaborate on defining and testing authorization policies, a REST API, open source SDKs for major languages, integration with different IDEs like VS Code and JetBrains, and a CLI.
• Enables comprehensive auditing and monitoring: Enables visibility into access events and permission changes.
• Scales effortlessly: Proven to handle extreme loads (tested at 1M RPS and 100 billion relationships) while maintaining speed.

Built on standards and open source

Just as standards propelled authentication forward, for both developers building B2B SaaS applications and IT and security professionals managing access to B2B SaaS applications, we believe they’re key to solving authorization. Okta is fully committed to an open approach:

• OpenFGA Foundation: Auth0 FGA is built on OpenFGA, a CNCF Sandbox project rapidly becoming the standard for cloud-native authorization, adopted by companies like Canonical, Grafana Labs, Docker, and GoDaddy. This ensures flexibility and avoids vendor lock-in; migrating between OpenFGA and Auth0 FGA is straightforward.
• OpenID AuthZen support: Auth0 FGA will support OpenID's AuthZen, a standard API simplifying authorization integration into apps and API gateways.
• IPSIE leadership: Okta is actively contributing to the OpenID working group for defining IPSIE, a standard that will allow synchronizing authorization data between application authorization systems (like Auth0 FGA) and identity governance systems (like Okta Identity Governance). IPSIE aims to bridge the gap between identity governance and application authorization systems by defining shared standards for session, user, and entitlement management — paving the way for consistent, synchronized authorization across the stack.

Investing in developer-friendly and enterprise-ready authorization — and making it work seamlessly with your broader identity ecosystem — is strategic for Okta. Okta needs to solve authorization to fulfill our company vision and maximize the value of our current product line. We're leading the way to solving this challenge for the industry.

Why Okta is uniquely positioned to solve authorization

Authorization is complex and mission-critical. Solving it demands deep expertise across identity and security domains. Okta is the only company we’re aware of that’s investing significantly in solving authorization for both sides of the equation:

1. For developers: Auth0 FGA provides a flexible, fast, scalable, and future-proof solution built on open source and open standards.
2. For IT and Security teams: Okta Identity Governance, Okta Privileged Access Management and Okta Identity Security Posture Management enable centralized visibility, auditing and governance of access for all identities across B2B SaaS applications, enabling least privileged access and driving better security outcomes.

We understand that externalizing authorization is a strategic decision with long-term implications. Once you make a choice, switching solutions is costly and complex. That's why choosing the right long-term partner from the get-go is crucial.

Okta is fully invested in solving authorization for the long haul. Our commitment minimizes lock-in through robust support for open source and standards, enabling success for developers, IT, and security professionals. This comprehensive approach makes Okta the ideal partner to solve your authorization challenges.

Join us. Build with Auth0 FGA. Help us shape the future of authorization — together.