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Apple @ Work: The enterprise needs to kill the SSO tax, and it’s an opportunity for Apple
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The SSO tax might be the most backward pricing model in enterprise software. Single sign-on should be required for sign-up, yet SaaS vendors routinely lock it behind their most expensive tiers. It should be the opposite. You should have to pay more not to have SSO. The result is entirely predictable: companies skip it, weak passwords fill the gap, and hackers thank everyone involved. I think there’s a real opportunity here for Apple, and it starts with an acquisition.
About Apple @ Work: Bradley Chambers has been an Apple IT admin since 2009. Through his experience deploying and managing firewalls, switches, a mobile device management system, enterprise grade WiFi, 1000s of Macs, and 1000s of iPads, Bradley will highlight ways in which Apple IT managers deploy Apple devices, build networks to support them, train users, share stories from the trenches of IT management, and ways Apple could improve its products for IT departments.
I covered this in my recent article on Dashlane’s Vault Enforcement: on average, 37% of enterprise SaaS apps are not managed via SSO, leaving a critical security gap, especially given that adoption of password management is still low, all things considered. That’s a third of the average company’s app surface protected by nothing more than a username and password. Some of that is legacy passwords and setup complexity, but a meaningful chunk is vendors charging a premium for the login method that actually keeps organizations safe. When SSO costs 2x or 3x as much as the base plan, SMB will often skip it
Everyone in the industry agrees this is broken. Nobody with enough leverage has been motivated to break it. Identity providers charge per user, SaaS vendors charge for integration, and the customer pays more for something that should be required. Imagine if MFA costs extra?
Here’s the thing: this problem has already been solved once, just not in the enterprise. Clever is the SSO and rostering platform used by a vast majority of K-12 schools. I’ve been a Clever admin multiple times in my career, and I absolutely love the service. Side note: Their support is among the best in the industry. I recently called them, and it felt like I was talking to someone up the road from me who knew exactly what my problem was and how to solve it. Seriously, shout-out to the Clever support team and to Clever leadership, who invest in it.
The model is the interesting part. Clever is free for schools and districts. Application vendors pay to be on the platform because the Clever app gallery is how they reach customers. That flips the SSO tax completely. Instead of the customer paying extra for secure login, the vendor pays for access to the customer, and secure login is simply how the platform works. Districts came to demand Clever support as part of any purchase, and vendors fell in line because losing deals was more expensive than integrating with Clever. I will not purchase a K-12 tool that doesn’t support Clever.
Clever was acquired by Kahoot in 2021 and has continued to operate as its own platform since.
Apple already has the pieces around the edges. Managed Apple Accounts, Apple Business, Apple School Manager, Platform SSO in macOS, and Sign in with Apple all exist today. What Apple doesn’t have is the connective service: a true identity layer that sits between organizations and the thousands of SaaS apps they use, with an economic model that makes SSO free for the customer.
Buying Clever gets Apple three thing