How B2B CIAM Solutions Give Your Business a Competitive Edge

In the digital age, we interact with countless applications, whether for personal, professional, or recreational purposes. Many of these applications appear consumer-oriented but are, in fact, business-to-business (B2B) applications. For example, when accessing healthcare services, payroll systems, or school management platforms, you are likely using applications where your provider (such as your GP or employer) is a business customer of a larger B2B application. B2B applications form an integral part of daily operations across various industries.

For businesses developing B2B applications that cater exclusively to business customers or a mix of consumers and business customers, it is crucial to adopt appropriate tools and processes. Below is an overview of the top challenges businesses encounter when running B2B applications, which we will explore in detail.

Inefficient Customer Onboarding

Manual, ad-hoc onboarding processes for business customers are often inefficient, prone to errors, and struggle to scale as the business grows. This inefficiency slows down the onboarding experience, increasing the risk of lost business opportunities by delaying access to valuable business partnerships. Instead of facilitating a seamless experience for customers and partners, relying on outdated, manual methods and inadequate tools creates barriers, making it harder for your customers to engage with your business effectively.

B2B identity solutions equip businesses with the right tools to automate the customer onboarding process, minimizing or eliminating manual intervention. With self-onboarding capabilities, customers and partners can quickly register without delays, integrating smoothly through B2B identity APIs into your existing customer-facing applications. If greater control is required during onboarding, you can leverage these APIs to initiate the onboarding process and invite new customers and partners. Alternatively, the administrative portal provided by the B2B identity solution can be rebranded and used to manage onboarding processes efficiently.

These onboarding features ensure that the experience is productive, streamlined, and scalable, supporting your business growth by fostering smooth engagement with customers and partners.

Administrative Overhead

After onboarding a business customer, the next step is to provision their staff with the appropriate entitlements to access and perform tasks within your application. However, the responsibility doesn’t end with initial provisioning. Your IT support team must continuously manage these accounts throughout their lifecycle. For example, when employees at a business customer or partner organization join, leave, or change roles, your IT support must provision or deprovision their accounts accordingly. These accounts may belong to staff members or consumers (end users) accessing your services via the partner organization. In both cases, your IT team bears the overhead of maintaining and managing these accounts, ensuring appropriate access is provided and revoked promptly as needed. This continuous user account lifecycle management for business customers and partners introduces overhead, as your team is responsible for handling multiple partner organizations, managing entitlements, and maintaining secure access across changing circumstances. Additionally, orphan user accounts pose significant security risks, primarily by providing unauthorized access to sensitive data and systems. These accounts, often overlooked, can be exploited by attackers, leading to data breaches and insider threats.

B2B identity simplifies not only customer onboarding but also the provisioning of administrative staff from business customers and partners. By integrating B2B identity APIs into your customer-facing applications, you can provide a self-care onboarding experience for administrators, minimizing the need for manual processes. Alternatively, if you choose to initiate the onboarding process yourself, you can invite administrators from your business customers and partners to join and delegate customer administration, empowering them to manage their customers—after all, they know their customers best. Even if you lack dedicated administrative interfaces, B2B identity solutions offer rebrandable portal components that can be adapted for use by partner administrators. These portals allow administrative staff to access relevant resources with permissions aligned to their role, ensuring their activities stay within predefined limits. Meanwhile, your organization retains full control over their access through robust access control mechanisms, safeguarding security and compliance.

Once the administrators of business customers and partners are provisioned into your application, they can onboard their end users either by connecting their business application with yours via APIs or by integrating with the customer’s Identity Provider (IdP). The latter approach offers significant benefits, including time and cost savings while enhancing security and privacy by avoiding duplicate account creation.

Empowering administrators to manage their own user accounts significantly reduces the overhead for your IT support and admin teams. This practice, known as delegated administration, shifts routine account management responsibilities—like user onboarding and deprovisioning—to the customer’s administrators. Importantly, this arrangement does not impose additional burdens on your customers' IT teams, as they are already responsible for supporting their own users. This model ensures streamlined operations on both sides, improving efficiency while maintaining secure access control.

Frictioned User Experience

Not having the right toolset and processes can lead to a friction-filled user experience for end users accessing services through business customers and partners. For instance, users may be required to manage separate credentials for your business capabilities, resulting in duplicate accounts and a cumbersome login process. Additionally, associating user profiles becomes more complex, which can hinder the provision of loyalty benefits such as rewards points and discounts. This fragmented user experience can ultimately damage brand loyalty and trust, preventing you from achieving your business goals when onboarding new customers and partners.

To address these challenges, B2B identity solutions enable business customers and partners to utilize their own customer identity providers, creating a frictionless user experience for their end users. This approach not only enhances loyalty between businesses but also allows consumers to seamlessly access your services using their existing credentials.

Additionally, businesses can easily implement reward systems, offering discounts and loyalty benefits to end users, as unique identities facilitate access across the business ecosystem. B2B identity solutions also provide extensive features that allow administrators from business customers and partners to customize the login flow to meet specific security needs. They can rebrand important end user touchpoints, such as sign-in screens, sign-up processes, and password recovery options, ensuring a smooth and cohesive experience for their customers.

Furthermore, this capability extends beyond just end users. After the initial onboarding of administrators from business customers and partners, other staff members can also be onboarded through their employee identity provider. This arrangement enables trusted identity providers to facilitate seamless access for the staff of business customers and partners while maintaining proper access control.

Increased Operational Cost

The manual, ad-hoc onboarding process for business customers and partners, along with reliance on IT support for administrative tasks, not only proves inefficient and hampers business growth, but also significantly increases operational costs, necessitating the recruitment of additional IT support staff, alongside their training and equipment expenses. As the number of business customers and partners scales, so too does the requirement for IT support, often leading to stagnating profits. These rising operational costs restrict your ability to invest in critical business growth activities, such as developing new capabilities and enhancing product marketing efforts.

In contrast, B2B identity solutions offer the best return on investment (ROI) for your initial investment, with costs remaining stable as your business expands. By automating the onboarding process and enabling delegated administration, B2B identity solutions can effectively lower your operational expenses over time. This allows you to redirect investments toward strategically important business initiatives rather than operational overhead.

Increased Security Risk

It is widely recognized that the human element is the weakest link in any security posture. Manual, ad-hoc onboarding of business customers and partners, along with reliance on IT support for administrative tasks, significantly increases security risks. In addition, the creation of duplicate user accounts for end users and staff members of business customers and partners also increase both security and privacy concerns because you are responsible for protecting those user profiles and credentials stored while ensuring compliance with privacy standards. For instance, when a staff member leaves a particular business customer or partner, your IT team has to deprovision the user and revoke access promptly.

Automating the self-care onboarding process reduces human touchpoints, thereby minimizing security risks. Additionally, B2B identity solutions provide essential end-to-end auditing capabilities. The "bring your own identity" feature, which allows integration with customer and employee identity providers, reduces the security and privacy risks as you don’t need to manage duplicate user profiles and separate credentials. Referring back to the earlier example, when a staff member leaves a business customer or partner, their identity provider ensures the timely deprovisioning of that user account from your systems.

Furthermore, B2B identity solutions empower your business customers and partners to configure various security requirements, including different assurance levels and multi-factor authentication (MFA) preferences. This flexibility enables you to onboard business customers and partners with security requirements that may differ from those of your organization.

Should You Build B2B Identity

After understanding the benefits of B2B identity, businesses must decide whether to build their own solution or adopt a purpose-built B2B identity solution. While building an in-house solution offers full customization and perfectly fits with your business applications, this approach has some downsides as well.

Consider the following factors before building:

• Time: Developing and maintaining identity solutions adds to your time-to-market.
• Cost: Building capabilities internally requires significant investment in development and support.
• Expertise: Identity management and security demand specialized knowledge and ongoing updates.

If these challenges are overwhelming, existing B2B identity solutions offer a faster, more cost-effective path to success.

WSO2 B2B Identity

The WSO2 IAM suite of products provides out-of-the-box B2B identity capabilities required for your business, including:

All these capabilities are available out of the box in a modern re-brandable portal and as secure REST APIs for integration, providing an app-native experience. The WSO2 IAM suite consists of the following three products that you can use to develop your B2B applications:

Asgardeo - A B2B identity capability offered as a public cloud (IDaaS) solution with a free tier. You can instantly sign up to try it out without installing any software.

WSO2 Identity Server - An open-source downloadable product that you can manage and run independently at no cost. WSO2 offers subscription support for Identity Server, which includes 24/7 global incident support, migration and query assistance, architectural and consultancy services, and periodic updates, including security patches.

WSO2 Private Identity Cloud - A private cloud offering deployed and managed by WSO2, providing an exclusive deployment in your preferred region and cloud infrastructure.

Conclusion

The absence of a fit-for-purpose B2B toolset and process can hinder business growth through inefficient onboarding, high administrative costs, poor user experiences, and increased security risks. Incorporating a B2B identity solution addresses these challenges, providing businesses with a competitive edge by streamlining operations and reducing costs. Early adoption of B2B identity solutions offers an opportunity to stay ahead of competitors and enhance business agility.