B2B Organization Management

B2B or business-to-business is a type of business model which involves a commercial transaction between two business entities. Businesses are moving towards a rapid digital transformation. To meet the needs of B2B requirements, companies are expanding beyond the traditional existence in a closed environment and are focused on having a presence in the cloud to offer a hybrid existence. IAM has become a pivotal aspect of this ecosystem in satisfying these evolving IT requirements. Ensuring the safety of digital identities and access to the services offered is a must for any use case that involves B2B applications.

It is important to understand the B2B requirements in your system by having a clear sense of the types of identities involved and the access levels of the users. Here an organization means a third-party business that requires a digital service offered by you as the service provider.

Let’s take a hypothetical scenario to further understand the B2B business model.

MedE is a company (service provider) providing a range of online health services to various businesses in the healthcare sector. XYZ Medic and Sunshine Hospital are two such companies consuming the e-channeling service application offered by MedE.

Assume you are the IT administrator of MedE. You will be responsible for the user life cycle management of the identities of the MedE business which alone can be a complex task. Imagine on top of that if you have to administer the identities of your partner organizations, XYZ Medic and Sunshine Hospital as well. The organizational identities here can be of multiple types ranging from employees of the organization to their customers.

There can be various use cases involved in B2B such as a doctor requiring to access MedE e-channeling instances of both the XYZ Medic and Sunshine Hospital organizations. There can be a user in the administrator role who will require to manage multiple organizations. The organization administrator can be an employee of the root business or can be an employee of the third party company. There can also be a need for the partner organizations to bring their own identity providers.

Another common requirement in the B2B model is to have an organization specific branded login experience. When the MedE e-channeling instance of XYZ Medic is accessed, it should display a branding specific to that organization.

Managing all of these B2B requirements in a standardized manner can certainly be a tedious task for MedE as the root business in this scenario. B2B customer onboarding requires the two business entities to come to an agreement on who will have access to what resources or services. When it comes to the management of the user lifecycle of partner organizations, it would be a cumbersome procedure for the root business to manage it without a mechanism to delegate the partner organizations to manage their own users.

Businesses such as MedE are very much in the need to reduce the overhead costs involved in B2B scenarios and focus on driving revenue. They require a standardized approach to delegate administrative tasks. A seamless connectivity experience should be delivered to the partners and customers who are interacting with your services. Put simply, a business requires a centralized system to manage all these different types of identities and have security controls applied to the services offered. The system should be scalable to handle multiple sub-organizations. In the IAM ecosystem, this is typically referred to as Organization Management. Choosing the right IAM solution to satisfy the B2B requirements should be done with careful consideration.

WSO2 Identity Server is currently working on a solution to cater to these B2B needs of your business. Stay tuned for something awesome!