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Ask HN: Main things to consider when building an app for business/enterprise?

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Re: Ask HN: Main things to consider when building an app for business/enterprise?

#41
post #12

I would use a standard open source product like keycloak for user management and all related permission, authentication and authorization handling. Most requirements like you said sso, connecting to active directory, etc can be solved out of the box then. When working with such a product you learn a lot about security, as you need to configure all the things.

I can't second this strongly enough. You will be asked for SSO, SCIM and so on very quickly by any sizable business. Using a mature auth solution will save you a lot of work. (If on AWS, you might also want to look at AWS Cognito. I've not worked with Azure or Google Cloud so no idea about those)

Google Cloud has Identity Platform. Basically Firebase Auth re-branded.

It’s meh. At least compared to polished / feature complete solutions like Auth0.

Re: Ask HN: Main things to consider when building an app for business/enterprise?

#42
post #34

Some things that I think are useful for an enterprise app: - Integrate with the organisation's authentication system, usually LDAP would suffice (sso is a plus but not really required) - Replicate the organisation's structure (directorates, departments, job titles, who reports to who etc). Some of this may be in LDAP but usually it is not enough and you need to integrate with another system like PeopleSoft - Auditing…

If you're SaaS, enterprise doesn't necessarily care what database you're using -- and some of them may be a polyglot even internally. (My dayjob is a SaaS that's old enough to have started on Oracle in part because we thought it would make us look "serious" to enterprise clients, which include some fairly large financial institutions. We just finally turned off the last Oracle server, after switching to Postgres; no…

Yes that's true. But please consider that some orgs prefer self hosting their software. In this case using their database would be preferable.

Re: Ask HN: Main things to consider when building an app for business/enterprise?

#43
post #16

Frankly, you have no chance of making a secure product if you don't have a ton of experience in this area. For single sign on, SAML for instance, you have to get a ton right with security certificates, xml parsing, manifest rules, signing algorithms, request expiration, etc. SAML (and other single sign-on protocols) are poorly designed and any single mistake is fatal. Some SAML libraries have support for null signing…

The obvious solution to all these problems is to not implement them yourself and use a platform like Auth0 or WorkOS.

Re: Ask HN: Main things to consider when building an app for business/enterprise?

#44
There are lots of really useful advices on all other comments but there is something I haven't seen mentioned yet. I had those problem when building a SaaS targeted at small to medium business (up to 200M annual revenue).

- Who is going to manage your software inside the business?

In my case we expected that by now almost all of those companies would have internal IT personnel or at least some qualified IT partners but it wasn't based on anything... and it wasn't true, this was a major pain point. We had to create a "sibling" company that handled user training, implementation, integration and many other things because most of our customers couldn't do this themselves. As you might understand customer spend on those services is higher than that on the actual SaaS but with way lower margin, think of Salesforce for example: many SF customers spend way more in partners than on software licences, and many if not most SF customers need a partner to implement SF and cannot do it themselves.

- Which problem are you trying to solve for those companies? Is this problem linked to other stuff?

When you start your project it may seem that it is a perfect fit and solves all the problems you are imagining, but as soon as you start selling you notice that those problems you are solving are just the tip of the iceberg. In a short time you may find yourself with a software that actually only solves 5% of the bigger problem and now there is a 95% of unknowns that must be addressed. Maybe in those unknowns there are other SWs, maybe legacy SWs, and you need to communicate/integrate with them or else your offer doesn't make sense to the customer.

From my anecdotal experience you need to find some initial customers that look like your potential target customer and sell them your idea, maybe having just a simple prototype, and only after you have a few you start building for real keeping those early adopters in the loop. If you're not a seller find a sales co-founder, sales are extremely important when dealing with business.

Please note: I don't know what you are building so those adivices might be totally irrelevant, I hope they can help you anyway :)

Re: Ask HN: Main things to consider when building an app for business/enterprise?

#45
post #33

From someone who has built 2 successful enterprise apps as eng #1 (1 sold, 1 going strong today valued over 100M) and worked on others that failed, the ONLY thing to worry about now is whether or not your customers really want and need your app. 99% of enterprise saas products fail because of this, not because of a missing feature. All the enterprise features like SSO, integrations, audit trails, etc can be built whe…

I can’t agree more. I have delivered several solutions to local enterprises, with questionable UX, no SSO, p2p integrations. We made changes while implementing, after we signed contract. The only thing you should care is to solve their burning problem and find the person, who has that problem. The rest is easy, not necessarily fast though. It took one year to sign contract.

Re: Ask HN: Main things to consider when building an app for business/enterprise?

#47
post #39

Don't build an app / SaaS / etc. Too competitive of a landscape. Think beyond that space.

Is this sarcasm? You can make totally new product in the form of app/SaaS in a niche with no/few competitors. It doesn't have to be yet another CRM/analytics tool

Re: Ask HN: Main things to consider when building an app for business/enterprise?

#48

I was heading tech and product of a SAAS software for ~15 months so writing this from that experience. - Who is the buyer? Typically they are not same as the user of the product so understand what they look for in similar products. - SSO, preferably SAML based. - As for security, take care of OWASP top-10 [1] and you should be covered for app-sec. - Implement RBAC. Make it easy to add/manage users for an admin-user.…

This is excellent, thank you!

Re: Ask HN: Main things to consider when building an app for business/enterprise?

#49

I was heading tech and product of a SAAS software for ~15 months so writing this from that experience. - Who is the buyer? Typically they are not same as the user of the product so understand what they look for in similar products. - SSO, preferably SAML based. - As for security, take care of OWASP top-10 [1] and you should be covered for app-sec. - Implement RBAC. Make it easy to add/manage users for an admin-user.…

https://www.enterpriseready.io/ is a good starting place that enumerates most of the great points made in the parent comment.
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