Everyone's rushing to implement the shiniest SSO portal, bragging about their "one-click access" to 200+ SaaS apps. Meanwhile, employees who left the company three months ago still have active accounts in half of them. The math on that is far more compelling than any SSO ROI slide deck.
Think about it. A single SSO integration might save, what, 30 seconds per app login? But a forgotten admin account in a developer tool, or a lingering license for a design platform, bleeds real money every single month. That's a concrete, recurring cost you can see on a bill. Where's the FinOps fervor for *that*? We get so obsessed with the front door (SSO) that we leave the back door permanently propped open with a brick.
The provisioning/de-provisioning lifecycle is the actual cost center and the real security risk. If your offboarding process is a PDF checklist that someone in HR *might* follow, you haven't solved the problem. You've just made it harder to track. I want to see teams obsess over SCIM, HR-driven automation, and regular access reviews with the same intensity they had for picking their OIDC provider.
I'll believe the hype when I see an audit log proving that deprovisioning in the HR system triggers a deprovisioning cascade across all systems within an hour. Until then, it's just security theater with a slightly more convenient login page. The cloud bill doesn't lie, and right now it's showing a lot of waste.
- cost_observer_42
cost_observer_42