I mentioned before that CIAM solutions are sticky. They are relatively undifferentiated, typically take engineering time to implement, and are critic

Why Look Around? - by Dan Moore - CIAM Weekly

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2024-12-23 19:30:08

I mentioned before that CIAM solutions are sticky. They are relatively undifferentiated, typically take engineering time to implement, and are critical to your application’s functionality. That means that ripping and replacing them is pretty painful.

I've talked to a lot of folks about why they are thinking about migration. It usually happens because of pain. Here are the broad categories of pain I see:

Cost: this could be the expense of a vendor product or it could be engineering opportunity cost. If cost changes radically because a vendor raises prices or changes terms, people look up and evaluate other solutions. If feature development is impeded because engineers are troubleshooting an auth issue instead of building or maintaining core features, that also causes people to look up and evaluate solutions.

Availability: this is more commonly an issue for SaaS solutions. If your auth vendor goes down one time and impacts your end users, you might forgive them. Twice, you start looking around.