Bring Your Own Identity Technology (BYOI): Solving Key B2B Challenges

With the growth of technology and infrastructure, many large businesses have a requirement to be a secure B2B business that provides services to multinational businesses in an easy and secure manner.   The complexities of implementing Bring Your Own Identity principles are two major B2B business problems that companies may face later in their IAM journey.  If your business does not have a flexible Identity and Access Management design, you may struggle to meet these requirements later in your IAM journey.  This blog will explain these security principles, the challenges of implementing them, and how Yenlo can help you implement these principles easily and cost-effectively.

What is Bring Your own Identity (BYOI)?

Bring Your Own Identity (BYOI) is a concept in Identity and Access Management (IAM) where individuals use their existing, external digital identities to access an organization’s resources, rather than having to create and manage new, separate identities specifically for that organization. This approach leverages identities that users already possess from third-party identity providers, such as social media platforms (e.g., Google, Facebook, LinkedIn) or specialized identity providers (e.g., Okta).

Bring Your Own Identity offers numerous benefits to your organization. There are  several reasons why the BYOI concept is becoming more popular in the CIAM world. Let’s look at the main key features of BYOI.

Key Features of BYOI

1. User Convenience: Users can log in with identities they already use and trust, reducing the friction of creating and remembering new credentials.
2. Enhanced Security: External identity providers often have advanced security measures in place, such as multi-factor authentication (MFA), which can enhance overall security.
3. Reduced Administrative Overhead: Organizations do not need to manage the lifecycle of user identities (e.g., creation, password resets, deactivation), as these are handled by the external identity provider.
4. Federated Identity Management:  BYOI often involves protocols like SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language), OAuth, and OpenID Connect, enabling secure authentication and authorization exchanges between parties.
5. Single Sign-On (SSO): Users can access multiple applications and services with a single set of credentials, improving user experience and productivity.

If your organization’s CIAM solution can achieve  these key features without issues,  it is fully compliant with BYOI. Many organizations struggle  to achieve these key features due to  various limitations.

Why is it hard to let your partner bring their own Identity Provider?

There are several challenges that make this BYOI concept difficult to achieve. Unless you fully address these challenges, it can be difficult to reap the full benefits of implementing BYOI in your CIAM Solution.

Main Challenges of BYOI

1. Dependency on External Providers: When integrating third party identity provided to the organizational CIAM system, the authentication is fully relied on the availability, security and the response time of the third-party identity provider. If the third-party identity provider experiences downtime or security issues, it will also impact your organizational CIAM system.

2. Privacy Concerns: As the main CIAM system organization, it will require user information to operate. This information is penetrated from the third-party identity provider that you allow to connect. The user data provided by these third-party identity providers should be accurate,  compliant with privacy regulations, and trusted by the organization.

3. Integration Complexity: Majority of third-party identity providers supports standard authentication protocols like OpenID Connect, SAML, WS-Trust, Kerberos etc. But minority of them use their own in-house proprietary protocols. When we integrate these minor identity providers, we may encounter issues during integration and maintenance due to its technological complexities. Hence, this could be an expensive and complex task.

4. Access Control: Although the authentication is provided by the third-party identity providers, the managing of access is the responsibility of the organizational CIAM solution. Therefore, ensuring that external identities are granted appropriate access levels within the organization requires robust access control policies. This should be properly managed based on the external identities’ groups or roles or permissions level.

From the high-level these challenges are straight forward and acceptable as we delegating authentication and security to a third-party identity provider, but if we design this BYOI architecture properly we can easily overcome these issues.

Advantages of BYOI for a B2B Business?

Despite these four main challenges, implementing BYOI offers many advantages for organizations within the CIAM system. Simplicity, security and user-friendliness are the most effective benefits that bring out of utilizing BYOI concept. Let’s look at this in more detail.

Benefits of BYOI

1. Improved User Experience: Simplifies the login process by allowing users to authenticate using familiar credentials. Users need not remember multiple usernames and passwords, instead he/she can use his most used, most secured social account for authentication purposes. In the modern world many tend to use their email account as their main source of login.
2. Cost Efficiency: Reduces costs associated with managing and maintaining internal identity management systems and processes. To securely store credentials of users inside an organization you need to maintain a secure authentication flow with MFA and other security mechanisms. This is expensive and risky.  With an increasing number of user accounts, a single security loophole could compromise all credentials. Legally and physically, losing credentials is costly. If an organization uses BYOI concept, the organization delegates the security of credentials to a third-party which is the user’s favorite identity provider or the social login. Therefore, the organization is not responsible for the security of the user’s credentials.
3. Scalability: Easily scales to accommodate many users, especially in consumer-facing applications. As an organization with BYOI, you don’t need to store credentials. Therefore, you do not need much storage or server space. You can easily scale up for a large user base using the same resources.
4. Enhanced Security: Leverages the robust security infrastructure of established identity providers, which often includes features like MFA, anomaly detection, and regular security updates. This  enhances security in a cost-effective way through a third-party.
5. Compliance and Standards: Adheres to industry standards for identity and access management and facilitating compliance with regulatory requirements is a tedious task for a single organization. When implementing BYOI, you will delegate and trusted to be done the third-party and you will only utilize data that is coming in the id-token or SAML response of the authentication response.

Compared to challenges, there are more direct and indirect benefits you can achieve by implementing BYOI. Many CIAM solutions in the market have the capability to achieve this. In this blog I am planning to explain how we can use WSO2 Identity Server to cater to this requirement.

How to implement BYOI easily with WSO2 Identity Server?

By leveraging BYOI, organizations can provide a seamless and secure authentication experience while minimizing the complexities and costs associated with managing internal identity systems.

To implement BYOI, you need to follow these 5 steps:

1. Choose Identity Providers: Select reputable and secure identity providers that support standards like SAML, OAuth, or OpenID Connect.
2. Integrate Identity Providers: Use federated identity protocols to integrate the chosen identity providers with your organization’s applications and services.
3. Define Access Policies: Establish clear policies for access control based on the roles and attributes provided by the external identities.
4. Monitor and Audit: Implement monitoring and auditing mechanisms to track access and ensure compliance with security policies.
5. User Education: Educate users on how to use their external identities securely and understand the implications of BYOI.

Let’s see how we can achieve these 5 steps with WSO2 Identity Server

Choose Identity Providers

There are varieties of Identity Providers we come across in our daily life. These Identity providers can be categorized in to two

• Social Logins
• Enterprise Logins

Social Logins are identity platforms that allow users or identities to share their social life events and information.  The most common social platforms include Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat, and WeChat.

Enterprise Logins are identity platforms that allow organizations to manage their identities providing organization specific services like emails, chat services, official services etc.  Most common such services are Office 365, Google cooperate service.   

The selection of identity providers should be based on the location of their customer data. If your organizational applications are open to public users or customers, then you can choose any identity provider from the Social Login category.  But if your user base is confined to school children or any other group, then you can choose your own authentication and storage mechanism or use Enterprise Logins like Office 365 or Google.

After choosing the identity provider you need to identify the protocol that they use to authenticate. The majority of Identity Providers support OpenID Connect, some legacy identity providers still use SAML. Social logins like Facebook, LinkedIn, and WeChat use their own protocols, which are extensions of the OAuth 2.0 standard..

By clearly identifying these two things will help us to design the BYOI concept for your CIAM solution easily.

Integrate Identity Providers

In WSO2 Identity Server CIAM solution, all these third-party identity providers should be configured as “Identity Providers” or “Connection” to cater the federation process. Then all the service providers can refer to these identity providers for federated authentication depending on your requirement.

• To configure an “Identity-provider” you need to access the console of WSO2 Identity Server or Asgardeo as an administrative user who has privileges to do the system level configurations and create a new connection (Identity Provider for older versions 5.11.0)

• Here you can multiple out of the box supported identity providers that can be connected to WSO2 Identity Server. If your chosen identity provider is one of them, then you can complete the required details and create a connection as shown below.

• Once you create the connection, you will get a UI with an easy configuration manual to connect your service providers with Google Login for BYOI.

With Identity Server 7.0.0, all the developer work of implementing BYOI has become easy with the user-friendly UI and out of the box connectors.

If any of your identity providers that selected is in the list of provided Identity Provider connection list, then you must select the custom connector option. Before this you need to write a custom federated authenticator by extending the AbstractApplicationAuthenticator class and implementing the FederatedApplicationAuthenticator class and deploying it to the Identity Server. For more information you can refer WSO2  : documentation: Write a custom federated authenticator

Define Access Policies

Defining access policies can be done at the application level when you define the authentication process with the third-party identity provider that you configured.

• For this first you need to go to the login-flow of the application and define the authentication options in the single flow. Here you can add conditional authentication to define the access policy depending on the requirement.
• You also can add special roles to make sure the user is authenticated from a federation flow and do some authorization based on that in the conditional authentication flow.

• On the other hand, if you want to clone user information except passwords or create a user account in your organization side during federation, you can achieve it through Just-In-Time provisioning in your identity provider or connection configuration.

Once you complete all these configurations, you are good to go with the BYOI implementation in your CIAM solution with WSO2 Identity Server.

Monitoring and auditing are out of the box supported by WSO2 Identity Server to check how many users have logged in through federation and other means to your CIAM solution. Educating Users is part of your marketing strategy and with BYOI, users can easily be on-board your platform without going through a hazel of filling in large forms and clicking on emails for validation.

How Yenlo can help you?

Yenlo specializes in providing digital transformation solutions, particularly focusing on integration and data management, which operate all around the world based in the Netherlands.  At Yenlo, we support multiple integration products, including the WSO2 stack. WSO2 Identity Server is one of the leaders in the CIAM market domain and Yenlo has many WSO2 technology senior level experts who can help you in designing concepts like BYOI with a complete CIAM solution for your organization. We have developers to write custom connectors for BYOI based on your selected identity providers. Not only on WSO2 Identity Server, Yenlo can support other CIAM solutions as well.

Our Solution Architects and project managers will help you to achieve your requirements faster and in a cost-effective manner with the help of our years of experience in the integration and CIAM industry.  We provide what you need, while also advising and guiding you through a secure and efficient implementation journey.

Please check out our white papers and customer success stories for more information.