You’d be surprised how many SaaS apps enterprises manage—sometimes well over a hundred. Research shows the average enterprise runs over 140 SaaS applications, creating major challenges for IT teams handling access, security, and compliance.
For B2B SaaS apps, this isn’t just a statistic—it’s a critical adoption factor. Enterprises must securely manage hundreds of employees, teams, and devices across their SaaS stacks. If your app doesn’t integrate smoothly into their authentication and user provisioning workflows, it creates friction, making IT teams less likely to adopt it.
User lifecycle management (ULM) solves this. It automates onboarding, offboarding, and role updates, ensuring enterprises can manage user access securely and efficiently.
Enterprise teams require specific access to different SaaS apps:
Without automated lifecycle management, IT teams must manually grant and revoke access—which is slow, error-prone, and costly.
For your SaaS app, this means fitting into enterprise workflows. It reduces friction for IT teams and makes your app easier to adopt. Enterprises rely on identity providers (e.g., Microsoft Entra, Okta) to streamline authentication and user provisioning via SSO and SCIM.
When employees leave, delays in revoking access expose enterprises to serious security risks. A former employee with active credentials can still access confidential data. This means zero-delay deprovisioning is crucial.
SSO and SCIM eliminate these risks with centralized user management.
Inactive user accounts lead to wasted licenses and unnecessary costs. Enterprises need automated deprovisioning workflows to:
How SCIM provisioning for SaaS can help: If your app supports SSO and SCIM, enterprises can automate provisioning, ensuring licenses are managed efficiently.
Enterprises need to meet regulations such as SOC 2, GDPR, ISO 27001 standards, that require:
How your SaaS can help: Built-in access controls, audit logs, and automated user provisioning make compliance easier—giving your SaaS a competitive edge.
Bottom line: If your SaaS doesn’t support automated lifecycle management, IT teams must manage access manually—which won’t scale.
For enterprises, an effective ULM system provides:
If your SaaS integrates seamlessly into enterprise identity workflows, it accelerates adoption and reduces churn:
Takeaway: SaaS products that handle authentication and provisioning effortlessly are easier to adopt and scale in enterprise environments.
Enterprise buyers expect authentication and user provisioning to just work.
If your SaaS doesn’t support automated enterprise user lifecycle management, IT teams won’t push for adoption—no matter how good your core product is.
Winning enterprise deals isn’t just about features; it’s about how well your SaaS integrates into enterprise IT workflows.