4 ms·

Normally an organization would have this protected via SSO & thus the deactivation of the employee's account on Gizmodo's systems would have kicked them off of

Normally an organization would have this protected via SSO & thus the deactivation of the employee's account on Gizmodo's systems would have kicked them off of the company's slack. Just another reason why it's valuable to avoid non-SSO 3p cloud apps so that "who's an active user" has a single source of truth.

throwanem 3y ago
Slack has supported SSO via a variety of providers for quite a long time now. If G/O Media didn't bother setting up the integration, that's on them.
timetopay 3y ago
One thing that SSO isn't great at is deactivating live sessions. Often, you either solve this with short session times (annoying to users), making a note in the de-provisioning steps document (not foolproof), or using a third party vendor (costly).
- tw04 3y ago
  Sure it is, this problem has been solved for a long time: SCIM. Any modern idp should support SCIM and if the app doesn’t I’d question using it at all.
  - timetopay 3y ago
    SCIM adoption isn't near where it needs to be. I guess yeah, this is the correct answer. We live in a world where SSO is considered an enterprise feature, I hope one day that it's considered default.
    - grinich 3y ago
      Shameless plug for my startup (hope that's ok!) If you're building an app and need to add SCIM, check out WorkOS. My email is in my profile to chat. More info -> https://workos.com/directory-sync https://workos.com/directory-sync
      - amenghra 3y ago
        $125 per connection / month and then you wonder why companies don't offer SSO/SCIM by default in their free/cheap plans.
        mooreds 3y ago
        (I work for a competitor in the same space as grinich.) Charging for scim is a convenient way to segment customers, the same way SLAs are. For companies that care deeply about controlling user access (or are forced to by law or regulator), that isn't much money. Features like this subsidize the free/cheap version, which you can then offer to let folks learn about and love your software, and use. After all, you can replace scim with careful manual processes until you get to a certain size. It's similar to the sso tax: https://sso.tax/ https://sso.tax/ I'm not aware of a scim.tax site, but maybe there should be one? :)
        newdee 3y ago
        > Charging for scim is a convenient way to segment customers It’s also a convenient way to keep charging non-SCIM customers for unused licenses when they inevitably forget to manually nuke accounts belonging to leavers.
    - mooreds 3y ago
      Agreed. And most apps have it locked to the most expensive level. Slack, to their credit, offers this at the business+ tier: https://api.slack.com/admins/scim https://api.slack.com/admins/scim
  - leeter 3y ago
    Me: "We should use SCIM, our IDP and our App both support it" PM: "No that's too complicated, we'll roll our own provisioning and never worry about de-provisioning because they won't be able to log in due to SAML anyway!" I can't tell you how many times I've had that conversation... but I'd need at least both hands and a foot.
    - grinich 3y ago
      This is why most SSO forces you to sign in again every day. So frustrating!
- cco 3y ago
  >...using a third party vendor (costly). I promise we're not _that_ costly. But yes, having built a slackbot/Slack OAuth myself and dealing with it at my $CURRENT_CO (stytch.com), Slack is a service you have to be very careful with. They offer a very powerful API and permissioning model, but it can be nerve wracking.

throwanem 3y ago

Slack has supported SSO via a variety of providers for quite a long time now. If G/O Media didn't bother setting up the integration, that's on them.

timetopay 3y ago

One thing that SSO isn't great at is deactivating live sessions. Often, you either solve this with short session times (annoying to users), making a note in the de-provisioning steps document (not foolproof), or using a third party vendor (costly).

tw04 3y ago
Sure it is, this problem has been solved for a long time: SCIM. Any modern idp should support SCIM and if the app doesn’t I’d question using it at all.
- timetopay 3y ago
  SCIM adoption isn't near where it needs to be. I guess yeah, this is the correct answer. We live in a world where SSO is considered an enterprise feature, I hope one day that it's considered default.
  - grinich 3y ago
    Shameless plug for my startup (hope that's ok!) If you're building an app and need to add SCIM, check out WorkOS. My email is in my profile to chat. More info -> https://workos.com/directory-sync https://workos.com/directory-sync
    - amenghra 3y ago
      $125 per connection / month and then you wonder why companies don't offer SSO/SCIM by default in their free/cheap plans.
      - mooreds 3y ago
        (I work for a competitor in the same space as grinich.) Charging for scim is a convenient way to segment customers, the same way SLAs are. For companies that care deeply about controlling user access (or are forced to by law or regulator), that isn't much money. Features like this subsidize the free/cheap version, which you can then offer to let folks learn about and love your software, and use. After all, you can replace scim with careful manual processes until you get to a certain size. It's similar to the sso tax: https://sso.tax/ https://sso.tax/ I'm not aware of a scim.tax site, but maybe there should be one? :)
        newdee 3y ago
        > Charging for scim is a convenient way to segment customers It’s also a convenient way to keep charging non-SCIM customers for unused licenses when they inevitably forget to manually nuke accounts belonging to leavers.
  - mooreds 3y ago
    Agreed. And most apps have it locked to the most expensive level. Slack, to their credit, offers this at the business+ tier: https://api.slack.com/admins/scim https://api.slack.com/admins/scim
- leeter 3y ago
  Me: "We should use SCIM, our IDP and our App both support it" PM: "No that's too complicated, we'll roll our own provisioning and never worry about de-provisioning because they won't be able to log in due to SAML anyway!" I can't tell you how many times I've had that conversation... but I'd need at least both hands and a foot.
  - grinich 3y ago
    This is why most SSO forces you to sign in again every day. So frustrating!
cco 3y ago
>...using a third party vendor (costly). I promise we're not _that_ costly. But yes, having built a slackbot/Slack OAuth myself and dealing with it at my $CURRENT_CO (stytch.com), Slack is a service you have to be very careful with. They offer a very powerful API and permissioning model, but it can be nerve wracking.