Authentication as a service, so your team ships the product instead
Authentication as a service means a provider runs the part of your product that checks who a user is: the sign-in pages, the password and passkey checks, the sessions and the tokens. Your application sends the user to the provider and gets back a signed token it can trust. The Skycloak Platform is that service, built for software companies.
What your application still does
The work left in your code is small and standard. When a user needs to sign in, your application redirects them to your tenant's sign-in page with an OpenID Connect request. After they sign in, the Platform redirects them back with a code, your application exchanges it for tokens, and from then on it checks the signature and the expiry of the access token on each request.
Every mainstream web framework has a maintained OpenID Connect client for this, so the integration is configuration and a few lines of code rather than a security project. Your application never sees a password, which also takes it out of a large part of a security review.
What the service takes on
The Platform hosts the sign-in, sign-up and recovery pages, stores the accounts and their factors, issues and rotates the signing keys and keeps the record of who signed in and when. Upgrades, database backups and capacity are Skycloak's work, not your team's.
Passkeys, multi-factor authentication and enterprise SSO over SAML for your business customers are on the Platform's plan, and adding them to your product is a matter of turning them on for your tenant rather than writing new code in your application.
Build it or buy it
Building sign-in yourself looks cheap at first because a login form is small. The cost arrives later, in password reset abuse, credential stuffing, session handling across devices, multi-factor recovery and the questionnaires your larger customers send. Buying it as a service turns that into a dependency with a clear interface, which you can test and reason about.
Because the Platform uses the standard protocols, you are not tied to a proprietary SDK. Any OpenID Connect provider can take its place later if your needs change, and that is the kind of exit a good dependency should give you.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a special SDK to use the Platform?
No. The Platform speaks OpenID Connect and OAuth 2.1, so the standard client library of your framework is enough.
Does my application ever handle passwords?
No. Users type their password or use their passkey on the Platform's sign-in page, and your application only receives a signed token.
See the Skycloak Platform for yourself
Book a demo and we will walk you through the Platform with your own sign-in flows in mind.