Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

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I don't know which security audits you're referring to. PCI doesn't require SSO for all SAAS apps. There's no standardized HIPAA/HITECH audit at all. SOC2 is probably the primary driver for SSO adoption, and even SOC2 doesn't actually require SSO (SSO is just the easiest way to meet a bunch of SOC2 security scope requirements). SOC2 is also the price-insensitivity threshold product managers are relying on for segmenting: most sane companies don't SOC2 until they're past product-market fit and are reliably closing sales (anybody who tells you to speculatively SOC2 before then is selling you something).

Again: it's obviously an inconvenience, or the sso.tax wouldn't be super annoying. I would of course prefer it if SSO were free everywhere.

This is another comment that makes insinuations about the competence of companies that tax SSO. But you can just look at the sso.tax site and see several companies with world-class security teams, so that argument doesn't work so well.

> There's no standardized HIPAA/HITECH audit at all.

HITRUST is the standardized audit for companies that care about HIPAA/HITECH, but your argument certainly holds there as well (everything you can say about SOC2 is just multiplied by an order of magnitude or two for HITRUST).

Do you really believe that these world-class security teams have the authority to influence this detail of the pricing models of their organizations, or the political naivete to fight this fight?

In some of these places, yes. It's a seller's market for this kind of talent, for whatever that's worth to you to know.

Ok this is a _fascinating_ comment. (thanks for the discussion as always by the way!)

Is there a link between the market for security engineering talent and the leverage that the security engineers have within their organizations? Are you seeing anecdotes play out in the industry that inspire hope that the balance of power in business decisions is shifting toward the engineers?

I don't think engineers automatically agree with you that organizations should pay less money for the services they're working on, is the issue here. It feels like a lot of people on this thread are convinced that Very Annoying Things are, per se, moral catastrophes. But they aren't. Services cost what they cost.

A literally equivalent way to look at the SSO tax is "the no SSO rebate". As a security engineer, I'm not prepared to launch a moral crusade over SMBs who don't adopt SSO on all their random SAAS apps; meanwhile, we're SSO on everything, and it costs us extra money, and that's life in the National Foosball League.

I’m the commenter that’s not on a moral crusade, or even annoyed, I just question the business justification for gating SSO in this day and age :)

See above: companies with SSO's are overwhelmingly less price-sensitive than companies without them, which tend to be smaller.

Times are changing though. Smaller companies increasingly have SSO portals. At what tipping point will the industry embrace SSO for everyone?

Since the whole point of the SSO tax is to segment out small companies from larger ones, mass adoption of single signon by small companies is a problem that will solve itself, as SSO stops being a good segmentation signal.

Are we talking past each other? It seems like we just disagree on when segmentation on SSO will no longer be prudent - I believe we’ve crossed that point, and you believe it’s in the future. Seems like we agree in substance though.

I don't think Thomas has an opinion on the "when". He's just saying it's being used that way. If it's being used that way, then it's still a good signal (in the markets where it is being used in that manner).

If it's actually true that we have crossed the point where it is no longer prudent for companies to segment their customers this way, then there are a whole lot of companies making unsound business decisions, and the problem will solve itself.

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