What is the difference between IDaaS and on-premises IAM?

On-premises IAM runs identity software in your own data center, which you patch, scale, and maintain. IDaaS delivers the same capabilities from the cloud as a managed service, with the provider handling availability, scaling, and updates.

What is the difference between IDaaS and SSO?

SSO is one feature that lets users access many applications with a single login. IDaaS is the broader platform that delivers SSO along with MFA, lifecycle provisioning, directory services, and access policies.

What are examples of IDaaS platforms?

Leading workforce IDaaS platforms include Okta Workforce Identity Cloud, Microsoft Entra, Ping Identity PingOne, OneLogin, and JumpCloud. Auth0 and similar platforms deliver IDaaS for customer-facing applications (CIAM).

A reputable IDaaS provider typically offers stronger security than most organizations can run alone, including phishing-resistant MFA, anomaly detection, and continuous patching. As with any cloud service, you still share responsibility for configuration, access policies, and integration. Many incidents sit on the customer side: in 2023 Okta warned that attackers were persuading customers' own help desks to reset super administrator MFA.

What happens if my IDaaS provider has an outage?

Every app federated to it loses new sign-ins until it recovers, which is why availability history, backup authentication paths and break-glass accounts belong in the evaluation. Microsoft publishes monthly Entra ID availability figures; its March 2021 figure was 99.568%, the lowest month in the table it has published since 2021.

What Is IDaaS (Identity-as-a-Service)?

Q: What is IDaaS?

IDaaS stands for Identity-as-a-Service: cloud-delivered identity and access management. A provider runs authentication, single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, and user provisioning as a subscription, so you do not operate identity servers yourself.

Q: How much does IDaaS cost?

Workforce IDaaS is usually priced per user per month. On October 30, 2026 SWI read Okta Workforce Starter at $6 and Essentials at $17 per user per month with a $1,500 annual minimum, and Microsoft Entra ID P1 at $7 and P2 at $10 per user per month paid yearly. Customer IDaaS (CIAM) is priced per monthly active user, often with a free tier.

IDaaS (Identity-as-a-Service) is identity and access management delivered from the cloud as a subscription, in which a provider runs authentication, single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, and user provisioning so you do not operate identity servers in your own data center. It is the cloud-delivery model of IAM. You still own the configuration: who can sign in, with which factors, to which apps, and what happens when someone leaves.

What IDaaS includes

Authentication and SSO. One login for many applications, using standards like SAML and OpenID Connect.
Multi-factor authentication. Push, one-time codes, and phishing-resistant passkeys built on WebAuthn.
Lifecycle provisioning. Creating, updating, and removing accounts across connected apps, usually via SCIM.
Directory services. A cloud directory of users and groups, or synchronization with an existing one such as Active Directory.
Access policies. Conditional and risk-based rules that decide when to allow, challenge, or block access.
Logs and signals. Sign-in and admin audit logs, and increasingly event streams to other tools through the Shared Signals Framework.

How it differs from on-premises IAM

The capabilities are similar; the operating model is not. With on-premises IAM you own the servers, the patching, the scaling, and the disaster recovery. With IDaaS the provider runs all of that, and you consume identity through APIs and standard protocols. That shifts effort from infrastructure maintenance to configuration and integration, and it scales elastically as you add users and apps.

Question	On-premises IAM (for example AD FS, self-hosted Keycloak)	IDaaS
Who patches the identity servers	You	The provider
Who holds the token-signing keys	You, on servers you must protect	The provider, in its infrastructure
How new features arrive	Upgrade projects	Continuous releases, some you must opt into
Availability	Whatever you build and test	The provider's SLA and architecture, plus your fallback plan
Cost shape	Licences or none, plus servers and staff	Subscription per user or per active user
Data location	Your data centers	Provider regions; check residency options

Self-hosting is still a real choice. Open-source servers such as Keycloak or Zitadel give full control at the cost of running them. Teams retiring on-premises federation can follow our AD FS to Entra ID migration guide.

Workforce vs customer IDaaS

IDaaS comes in two flavors that are bought by different teams and priced differently.

	Workforce IDaaS	Customer IDaaS (CIAM)
Users	Employees, contractors, partners	Consumers or business customers
Typical scale	Hundreds to hundreds of thousands	Thousands to hundreds of millions
What matters most	App catalog, provisioning, governance, device trust	Sign-up conversion, social login, consent, branding, fraud
Pricing unit	Per user per month	Per monthly active user, often with a free tier
Examples	Okta, Microsoft Entra ID, Ping Identity, OneLogin, JumpCloud	Auth0, Microsoft Entra External ID, Amazon Cognito, Descope

Workforce IDaaS secures employees and contractors (see what is workforce identity), emphasizing governance, provisioning, and integration breadth. Customer IDaaS, usually called CIAM, secures external users at much larger scale and prioritizes frictionless registration, consent, and privacy.

Published prices show the gap. In the Identity Pricing Transparency Index 2026, SWI read Okta Workforce Starter at $6 and Essentials at $17 per user per month (with a $1,500 annual minimum) and Microsoft Entra ID P1 at $7 and P2 at $10 per user per month, paid yearly, on October 30, 2026. CIAM free tiers checked the same day ran from 5,000 to 1,000,000 monthly active users depending on the vendor. Watch for the SSO tax on the apps you connect: many SaaS products charge extra before they will federate with your IDaaS at all.

The shared responsibility line

The provider secures its platform. You secure your tenant. The incidents that hit IDaaS customers mostly sit on your side of that line.

Responsibility	Provider	Customer
Platform availability, patching, signing keys	Yes	Plan for its failure
Which factors are allowed, MFA coverage, exemptions	Offers options	Configures and enforces
Admin roles, help desk reset rules	Offers controls	Decides who can do what
App onboarding and deprovisioning	Offers SCIM and connectors	Connects every app and owns the leaver process
Monitoring tenant logs	Provides logs	Collects, alerts and responds

Failure modes to plan for

Accounts without MFA on a cloud platform. Snowflake is a data platform rather than an IDaaS, but the pattern applies to any cloud tenant. In the 2024 Snowflake customer campaign, about 165 customers were hit with credentials from infostealer malware against accounts with no MFA. The fix was tenant policy, not provider code. See the teardown.
Help desk resets of admin MFA. In 2023 Okta warned that attackers were calling customers' service desks to reset super administrator factors, compromising four customers. The defense is a reset process that verifies identity and limits who can reset admins (help desk social engineering).
Provider-side compromise. The provider's own support systems are part of your attack surface. In the 2022 Sitel incident a subprocessor's support workstation was used to reach two Okta customer tenants, and in the 2023 support system breach session tokens in uploaded HAR files were taken from 134 customers' case files (session cookie theft, teardown). Scrub HAR files before sharing and bind admin sessions where the provider allows it.
Provider outage. When the IDaaS is down, so is every federated login. Microsoft publishes monthly Entra ID availability, measured as successful user sign-in minutes; its lowest published month since 2021 was March 2021 at 99.568%, and it says it plans no downtime for maintenance. Ask every provider for the equivalent history, and keep break-glass accounts and an identity resilience plan for the apps that cannot wait.

How to adopt IDaaS: a short checklist

Pick the population first. Workforce and customer identity are different products; do not force one to serve both without testing.
Inventory applications and how each authenticates (SAML, OIDC, LDAP, header-based, or local passwords). Legacy protocols decide how much bridging you need.
Decide the source of truth for people: the HR system, an existing directory, or the IDaaS directory itself.
Set MFA policy before migration, with phishing-resistant factors for admins. Compare options with the MFA matrix.
Connect provisioning (SCIM) for the top apps so deprovisioning is automatic, not a ticket.
Lock down admin and help desk paths: few super admins, verified resets, alerts on factor changes.
Stream logs to your SIEM or ITDR tool and test an alert end to end.
Test the outage plan: break-glass accounts, offline access to critical systems, and who decides to fail open or closed.

When IDaaS is the right choice

IDaaS suits almost any organization that wants to avoid running identity infrastructure, needs to connect cloud applications quickly, or wants strong security without a large identity operations team. It is a weaker fit when regulation or contracts require identity data to stay in a location no provider serves, or when air-gapped systems cannot reach a cloud service. Very large enterprises with complex legacy estates often combine IDaaS with other components into an identity fabric rather than relying on a single platform. For a comparison of the leading platforms, see our analysis of the top IDaaS platforms and workforce identity platforms, the Okta vs Microsoft Entra comparison, and the how to choose an IAM platform buyer guide.