sso-wall-of-shame VS Gravitational Teleport

Hi! Tailscalar here. This is very topical for me! Over the past 3 weeks I've been working with internal stakeholders to remove our SSO tax - the sso tax is a pet hate of mine. A couple of weeks ago we removed it from our pricing plan after my proposal was approved, and today I released a blog on our website to announce it more widely: https://tailscale.com/blog/sso-tax-cut

I knew of https://sso.tax (which we are not listed on but I did include in my blog), but didn't know there was another website too!

I'm not the person you've asked, but I'm somebody who has been purchasing SaaS/software for businesses large and small for years. My take:

1. If SSO and other basic modern security features are locked into "Enterprise" pricing tiers then the service is at the bottom of the list (see: https://sso.tax). I'd love to say instant disqualification but too many SaaS companies have it in their head that only wealthy enterprises use SSO, despite SSO platforms being widely available and some quite cheap to acquire and start using.

2. If I need to request a quote to start any kind of service to see what the product is about then I'm not likely to pursue it. Don't make me jump through hoops when I'm just trying to see if a product can fit my needs.

3. If license terms are too complex or easy to violate that's a hard pass. Infrastructure monitoring tools are a great example. The licensing is often per "device" or per monitored metric, and some vendors are very loose with their definition of "device". (Don't use LogicMonitor with k8s unless you like throwing money in the garbage can). Hard lessons learned.

4. If the only details I can find regarding how you secure your product are claims of SOC2 and ISO27001 certification then that's a very likely pass. Those controls are great to have, necessary even, but anyone who has had to work to meet those compliance objectives knows that they're much more about organization controls than they are product security. Give me an idea about how you protect data and whatnot on a security page somewhere, not an attestation that dev and prod are separate and you have logs.

On the side of the positives, outside of not hitting the negative marks, I value ease to work with, responsive and competent support, strong pre and post-sales solutions architecture and support/training (if the product is complex enough to warrant that), and supports SSO. I bring up SSO again because it's a hard requirement for SaaS purchases everywhere I go -- no SSO, no go. Social login is not a substitute and is highly undesired.

Hope this helps.

Don’t be shy, here’s the link: https://github.com/robchahin/sso-wall-of-shame/issues.

It sounds like you're unaware of why SSO is considered a security feature at all them, but it's covered right on the site: https://sso.tax/

It's to allow centralized access management. Stuff like firing someone and revoking their access from one platform instantly, instead running around and changing permissions in every tool manually. Or ensuring people in department A can't be invited to some platform for people in department B in order to limit information access.

SSO tax is predicated on the idea that the moment you outgrow the informal arrangements and liberal access, you're really a business. Seems pretty fair?

Last time I had to implement Okta integration for DocuSign at my employer it was absurdly expensive. If Google does this right then I’d be ever so happy.

DocuSign on the SSO Tax site: https://sso.tax/

There’s a strong, widespread objection to hiding security features behind a paywall: https://sso.tax/

If 2fa is the only way you can differentiate in order to force enterprises to pay, it’s better to have a fee for security than to die because you can’t make money… but broadly, as a security company, you should aim for maximum security for every user.

I totally understand. I'm aware of the SSO tax. It's just honestly a complex feature, with a significant maintenance and support burden, and I leaned making it EE so that it'd be worth all the effort to implement and maintain (i.e. I want it to be a new-positive feature for revenue). But if I could get help from other contributors, I'd be fine with SSO being a CE feature too.

Need to put them up for the SSO Wall of shame. https://sso.tax/

https://github.com/gravitational/teleport/blob/master/rfd/00...

I ordinarily would have said you reinvented Teleport <https://github.com/gravitational/teleport/tree/v14.3.7#readm...> but now that they've gone AGPL with v15 I'm guessing there's a market for MIT licensed stuff, although for sure since Teleport has been around for so long it has encountered more edge cases and undergone more security reviews. I was surprised while digging up the link that Gravatational is still releasing v13 and v14 updates under Apache 2, so maybe even Teleport will continue to have legs for those who cannot deploy AGPL stuff

Teleport is an SSH for Clusters and Teams and aims to be the drop-in replacement for OpenSSH.

Are you looking to set up SSO for your cloud infrastructure? Or maybe establish tunnels to access services behind NATs and firewalls. Then Teleport is for you. It provides connectivity, authentication, access controls and audit for infrastructure. The newest update has a tonne of new features and improvements including enhanced device trust support, SSH connection resumption, MFA for admin actions, improved provisioning for Okta, and heaps. more. Check out all the changes in the Teleport release notes.

In case you didn't see it: https://goteleport.com/blog/teleport-oss-switches-to-agpl-v3... and https://github.com/gravitational/teleport/pull/35259

I readily admit it's not the same amount of :fu: as BuSL or whatever the fuck is going on over at Sentry but still :-( as compared to their much friendlier Apache 2

Link to GitHub -->

OP here, thanks for posting! Happy to Answer any questions. I have to give our a shoutout to Alan at Teleport for all his work on Passwordless and his work to make Passwordless / TouchID work with MacOS CLI https://github.com/gravitational/teleport/blob/master/rfd/00...

I work on the Desktop Access feature for Teleport: https://goteleport.com/docs/desktop-access/getting-started/

The tool itself is open core: https://github.com/gravitational/teleport

Most of the desktop access stuff is open source. The only desktop related thing that's proprietary is our tool that allows for access to machines not connected to Active Directory. A sizeable chunk of the desktop access code is even Written In Rust™: https://github.com/gravitational/teleport/tree/master/lib/sr...!