The Ultimate Guide to Outsourcing Your Auth
The Ultimate Guide to Outsourcing Your Auth
About the Book
Almost every software application has users. In the online world, applications may have one or few users, if internal, or billions of users, if Facebook (hi Zuck!). Most applications customize functionality and the user interface for each user because of business rules or customer expectations.
Users are a fundamental entity. If you are building an application, you'll almost certainly have users. At FusionAuth, we've built a flexible auth system that makes managing users easy and secure. We talk to people about their auth systems every day and have helped plenty of folks migrate to FusionAuth from other systems, whether commercial, open source, or homegrown.
While modern auth systems can be quite complex, three pieces of functionality appear in almost every one: authentication, authorization and user management. When you are implementing an application, you can choose to build this functionality from scratch or use an existing auth system provider to outsource.
Much like you outsource your data management to a relational database system such as Postgresql, you can do the same with auth, with many of the same benefits.
This book will cover how to evaluate an auth system, risks you might encounter and how to mitigate them, and migration and implementation details.
About the Author
Table of Contents
-
What Is an Auth System
- Authentication
- Authorization
- User Management
- Categories of Auth Functionality
- Conclusion
- Evaluation
-
Why Outsource Your Auth System
- Speed To Market
- Consequences Of an Auth Breach
- Consequences Of an Auth Outage
- Maintainability
- Cost of In-House vs Outsourced Auth
- Auth May Be Unrelated to Your Core Competency
-
Getting Buy-In For Outsourcing Auth
- Your Boss
- Your Developers
- Project Management
- Product Management
- Legal
- Quality Assurance
- UX and Design
- Security
- Infrastructure
- Opportunity Cost
-
Performing Due Diligence on Authentication Vendors
- Examining the Authentication Provider’s Security Standards
- Measuring Performance With Benchmarks
- Engineering Effort to Implement Authentication
- Pricing
- Conclusion
-
The Value of Standards-Compliant Authentication
- Why Use a Standardized Authentication Protocol?
- Survey Of Authentication Standards
- Conclusion
-
Open Source Vs Commercial Auth Providers
- Open-Source Authentication Providers
- Commercial Authentication Providers
- The Final Showdown
-
The Value of Trying Your Auth Provider Before You Commit
- Advantages of Trying an Auth Provider Before You Buy
- Running an Effective Trial
- Free Trials Are Important
- Risks
-
Common Authentication Implementation Risks and How to Mitigate Them
- Security and Privacy
- Performance
- Regulatory Compliance
- Cost and Time
- Integration and Features
- Vendor Assessment
- Conclusion
-
Avoiding Authentication System Lock-in
- Look For Open Standards
- Consider Portability
- Limit Your Usage Where You Can
- Insulate Your Application
- Have a Backup Plan
- Wrapping Up
-
What To Do When Your Auth System Vendor Gets Acquired
- Short-Term Concerns
- Short-Term Benefits
- Long-Term Concerns
- Long-Term Benefits
- Mitigating Concerns
- Conclusion
- Implementation
-
Multi-Tenant Vs Single-Tenant IDaaS Solutions
- Multi-Tenant
- Single-Tenant
- Multi-Tenant Within a Single-Tenant Solution
- Private Labeled Identity
- Dev, Stage and Prod
- Conclusion
-
Making Sure Your Auth System Can Scale
- Why Scaling Auth Is Hard
- How Can You Effectively Scale Your Authentication?
- Conclusion
-
When to Self-Host Critical Application Architecture
- Evolution Of Self-Hosting
- The Benefits Of Self-Hosting
- The Downsides Of Self-Hosting
- Legal Considerations
- A Non-Permanent Choice
- Conclusion
-
Migration of Auth Data
- Why Migrate User Data
- Types Of Migration
- Planning and Mapping
- Big Bang Implementation
- Segment By Segment Implementation
- Slow Migration Implementation
- Conclusion
-
Best Practices for Registration Forms
- Is a Registration Form Needed At All?
- Ease the Pain Of Registration
- Multi-Step Registration
- Final Thoughts
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