Authorization: Build vs Buy in 2024

Should you build a custom authorization system solution in-house or outsource the work to third-party vendors? The de facto standard for different engineering teams leans towards developing and shipping every feature from the ground up. Let's face it, with the success of third-party tools such as payment gateways, email marketing platforms, authentication providers, etc, outsourcing certain functions—including, third-party authorization solutions—has become an increasingly attractive option.

Making the decision to build vs buy can pose a significant dilemma for your team. Each approach has its own set of trade-offs, advantages, and challenges. In this guide, we’ll debunk the major considerations of building versus buying to help you weigh and make the best decision for your organization.

The Build vs Buy Decision: A Framework

Should authorization be among the functions you abstract from your core stack? The answer isn't one-size-fits-all. Essentially, when choosing between building or buying an authorization system, it's important to evaluate both options in the context of your organization's specific needs.

Over the years, the technologies and approaches we use to build different solutions, have evolved significantly due to rapid technological advancements. These changes have remodeled how we build applications and how users interact with them. New "shiny" innovations are increasingly introducing new layers of complexity to different components, including authentication and authorization. A good example is how different multi-tenant apps now include advanced authorization logic with complex role hierarchies and permission sets.

And just like any other feature, your engineering team could potentially build an authorization system from scratch. Even so, should you really? Importantly, what does building really entail? Conversely, how does buying an authorization system impact your product?

Essentially, there isn't a definitive right or wrong answer; instead, it’s a matter of weighing the trade-offs. Let’s break it down.

What Does it Mean to "Build" an Authorization System?

Building an authorization system means developing the entire solution in-house while making sure you tailor the solution to your product’s specific requirements. Essentially, “D-I-Ying” authorization services for all your client-facing apps, as well as internal tools.

This is particularly practical and makes sense, technically, if your products require highly customized workflows, specific user hierarchies, or stringent security and compliance setups.

This is also possible if your core business product only requires a very simple solution ( this doesn’t mean a sub-standard authorization setup) that can handle user authentication and generally, can manage your apps’ access control requirements.

Ideally, most systems start out this way—with the initial bare bones, and with time, add more complex authorization feature updates.

Simply put, when you build the system, your team is responsible for everything—from conceptualizing and designing the different access models to building and managing the authorization API service with its resources. With an in-house system, you can make sure you adapt every aspect of the system to fit your business logic. You basically own the codebase. This means you have full control of how you build and ship the entire solution.

What Does it Mean to "Buy" an Authorization System?

On the flip side, "buying" involves purchasing a subscription for an authorization service from a third-party provider that is already built, tested, and ready for integration. These solutions are designed for broad use cases but often come with customization options that can easily be adapted to your current technology stack and specific authorization use cases.

Adopting third-party solutions has only become increasingly feasible since different vendors provide easy-to-integrate APIs and SDKs. Our solution, Permify, for instance, provides the following SDKs Node, Java, Go, Python, Typescript, and JavaScript.

The primary advantage of buying is the speed of implementation. You can quickly set up and deploy the solution rather than investing time and assets into developing a custom system.

Key Considerations for Build vs Buy Decisions

When deciding between building and buying an authorization system, it’s important to evaluate different factors. This may range from the cost (i.e. monetary, infrastructure, human capital) to scalability, functionality, and applicability in your specific use cases.

Building offers complete customization but requires significant time, effort, and ongoing maintenance. On the other hand, buying provides quick setups and vendor support but may limit flexibility and customization. Balancing these trade-offs will help you make a decision that aligns with your business goals.

The MECE Approach to Build vs Buy

MECE (Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive) is a decision-making framework used to break down and organize complex ideas, problems, or data into manageable sets to help in decision-making when faced with competing alternatives, like in this case, whether to build or buy. It helps organize your options into clear, non-overlapping categories, ensuring all key factors are covered. This way, you can critically evaluate all of them and make informed and objective decisions.

In this context, let's take a look at a quick example. Assuming you are a co-founder of a financial tech startup evaluating whether to build or buy a customer relationship management (CRM) system. To make an informed decision, you need to assess whether buying an off-the-shelf CRM or building one from the ground up will yield better results.

Both approaches come with unique trade-offs. Some factors might be mutually exclusive—such as the expenses related to assets like infrastructure, time, and human capital—while others are collectively exhaustive—like considering all potential scalability requirements and integration challenges that could arise.

Using this structured approach and grouping all possible considerations on the table into logical sets, ensures that all critical factors are addressed, helping you make the best decision.

Advantages of Building an Authorization System

One of the major benefits of building your own authorization system is the ability to shape its direction and scope according to your specific requirements. This level of product ownership provides a competitive edge, allowing you to develop a solution that better meets the needs of your customers. Beyond that, there are several other key advantages to look forward to. They include:

Full control over customization: Arguably, third-party solutions design their product offerings to serve a broad customer base, which means they tend to be generic. While some offer customization options, you're often limited by what the product allows.

On the other hand, building your own system gives you full flexibility. You can design components that perfectly align with your business’s unique workflows, user roles, rights, etc; giving you a solution that truly fits your specific requirements.
Tailored security features for compliance: Every industry comes with its own set of regulations and policies that need to be met. With a custom system, you can ensure that you design authorization components that are perfectly aligned with your industry’s specific regulations and internal policies.

This level of customization ensures your products meet compliance requirements such as GDPR or HIPAA while allowing for rapid adjustments to evolving regulations.
Seamless integration with existing infrastructure: If you are building a fully-fledged software solution, then your technology infrastructure will most likely have a multitude of moving parts. Building your own authorization system ensures your team can integrate it smoothly with all components, whether on-premises or in the cloud, including databases, authentication mechanisms, and microservices.

For complex setups, a custom system allows your internal APIs and services to work seamlessly together without relying on external services for authorization checks and access decisions. This gives you greater control over your infrastructure and reduces potential dependencies.

Even so, in the long run, once you get your initial working version of the ground, and continue scaling, you are going to break even and realize the gains. Ideally, since you're not tied to vendor pricing or forced to pay for things you don’t actually need. Ultimately, you will be investing in a solution that will evolve with your business without constantly incurring extra charges.

Challenges of Building an Authorization System

While building a custom system comes with many benefits, there are several challenges that you need you need to carefully consider:

Development costs and time to market: Remember, authorization services are critical components in systems, managing how customers interact with your product. They serve as the gateway to accessing various services. This means, while building, you can not have any room for mistakes (they can be painstakingly costly). From the first line of code to deployment, the system must be technically flawless to handle its crucial function.

To build a nearly perfect (weighted based on your product benchmarks) solution, it would require a significant monetary, time, and skilled human capital investment. This means that, depending on complexity, it would take a significant amount of time to ship your product to customers. In contrast, integrating a vendor's solution can often be accomplished within a couple of days to weeks, allowing for a quicker deployment to production.
Technical complexity and maintenance: Every system starts off simple, typically with a basic API endpoint to spawn the authorization web service. However, as your product evolves, naturally, your authorization requirements become more complex to accommodate different authorization edge cases like multi-level hierarchies, custom roles, and so on. Is this all? No! There are several other pain points of having to build and manage a custom authorization service such as ensuring consistent access checks across the different app services, as well as effectively managing and persisting different authorization policies.

Due to the critical nature of authentication and authorization services, this complexity will necessitate deep knowledge of data management, security protocols, and high-level system architecture paradigms such as microservices.

Moreover, you also need to note that these systems need to be highly available, with non-existent to minimal latency. This means that to maintain these systems, you will need to technical expertise to continuously push updates, frequent patches, and regular audits to keep them secure and efficient.
Risk of security vulnerabilities: Building an in-house system carries the risk of introducing vulnerabilities, especially if the design or implementation is flawed. A small mistake—such as an error in encryption or password hashing logic—could lead to serious breaches, exposing sensitive data to unauthorized users.

Without the safety net of external security support, your team will need to manage these risks and conduct regular security audits to identify potential loopholes and ensure user data and the system remains secure.
Resource allocation and talent constraints: Depending on the amount of resources at your disposal and the size of your teams, building an in-house authorization system that meets industry security standards can either feel like a walk in the park or a long hike up a mountain.

If you are working with a lean team, then, it can get pretty challenging. Limited personnel means more pressure on everyone, which can lead to burnout and slow down development and turn-around times.

Advantages of Buying an Authorization Solution

So, are there any benefits to purchasing a subscription for an authorization solution from a vendor? Absolutely! Let’s take a look at some of the most obvious advantages:

Quick deployment: The wild card to buying a solution lies in its ease of integration into existing infrastructure and how quickly you can get it up and running. It's as simple as talking to your vendor, choosing a subscription, and then either having their team assist with the integration or letting your own team handle it.

Most vendors provide plug-and-play solutions—remember Permify's SDKs we mentioned earlier—allowing you to deploy the system quickly without the lengthy development process. This means you can hit the ground running and focus on what really matters for your business.
Pre-built, tested security features: Since most vendors target a broad customer base, their solutions come with industry-standard security features that have already been rigorously tested in real-world scenarios across industries.

Permify, for instance, provides centralized authorization capabilities, fine-grained authorization, and a scalable authorization service. This means you can trust that these features are reliable, secure, and effective, saving you the time and effort required to develop and test new ones from scratch.
Vendor support and maintenance: The beauty of using a third-party solution is that you can easily offload much of the responsibility for software updates and maintenance to the vendor.

This means your internal team doesn’t have to worry about handling security patches or software upgrades—it's all taken care of. This generally translates to cost savings since it allows your teams to focus their efforts on other critical areas of the core business that generate revenue rather than extensively supporting the authorization solution.
Integration with other systems: If you are thinking about integrating a third-party authorization solution, then since, most offer a variety of security add-ons out of the box, this should be a no-brainer decision.

For instance, some vendors provide Single Sign-On (SSO) integration with existing Identity Providers over OpenID Connect or OAuth2. This allows users to securely access multiple applications with a single set of credentials. This not only streamlines the login process but also enhances security by centralizing authentication while maintaining robust authorization across different systems.
Scalability based on business needs: Successful marketing campaigns coupled with the right product offerings often attract more users. Growth, changes in the dynamics of your customer base, as well as product updates, may necessitate changes to your authorization setups. For example, if your product initially started as a file-sharing platform and later added peer-to-peer messaging, you'd need to update your authorization logic to handle this new feature.

With a third-party solution, you have the flexibility to choose features and subscription plans that can scale alongside your applications. For new integrations, you can start with basic plans, and then proceed to subscribing to customized enterprise packages that adapt to your solution as your needs evolve. You can work alongside your vendor to tailor a subscription plan that aligns with your requirements. This ensures your authorization services remain effective and aligned with new demand.

Challenges of Buying an Authorization Solution

Despite the advantages, there are some drawbacks to consider when purchasing third-party solutions:

Limited customization: Can you really achieve full customization with vendor solutions? This is largely debatable and alludes to two different lines of thought. On one hand, you might argue that as long as the solution checks off most of the boxes during installation and allows for some level of customization to fit your requirements, everything should be just fine.

On the other hand, since we can’t really predict with near-perfect certainty how the needs of a particular system will evolve over time—especially with the changing business and technology landscapes—will those customizations adapt to the changes? Vendor solutions often fall short in terms of the level of customization a homegrown system can provide.

If you anticipate that your operating environment will spawn off unique authorization requirements, you may find it challenging to adapt a vendor solution to your needs without incurring hefty fees for custom modifications.
Vendor lock-in: Once you’ve committed to a specific vendor, switching to a different platform can be both difficult and expensive. This is particularly the case when there are integration dependencies and challenges related to data migration. Vendor lock-in can limit your flexibility as your needs change or as technology evolves, which might make it harder to adapt or scale in the future.
Systems' migration and integration hurdles: Integrating a third-party solution is easier said than done. Ideally, implementing a third-party solution often requires significant effort to adapt the tool to your system’s infrastructure and migrate data, which can be both time-intensive and resource-heavy.

This challenge is not limited to data migration only; there are other potential challenges you might encounter such as aligning security protocols, managing compatibility with existing applications, and reconfiguring workflows to fit the new system.

Essentially, integrating the solution into the existing stack and ensuring a seamless user experience are critical but complex aspects of adopting a third-party authorization tool. This adds another layer of potential difficulty to making a successful transition.

Key Factors to Consider When Deciding

When weighing the decision to build or buy an authorization solution, it’s essential to align your choice with your business's unique needs and constraints.

Just like any significant technical decision, the "build vs. buy" debate really does involve juggling between trade-offs; balancing technical requirements, business goals, and so on. While we can't exhaustively cover all aspects you need to weigh, let's explore some of the most common considerations:

Business requirements: security, and complexity: Your product carries the most weight when evaluating your business’s technical needs. Ideally, the option you choose should allow your product to scale effectively, meet security standards, handle the complexity of your workflows, and lastly, accommodate future changes.

Business is a game of numbers. The more users you have, the greater your revenue potential, which translates to increased profit, and consequentially, the ability to keep your doors open in operation.

Undoubtedly, security is a core business requirement across various industries. Creating your own system lets you implement authorization services tailored specifically to your business security and compliance needs. However, it also places the responsibility of staying updated with the latest security patches and best practices squarely on your teams' shoulders.

Conversely, purchasing an off-the-shelf solution can simplify this process. Many third-party vendors offer solutions pre-configured to handle complex security requirements and provide regular updates to ensure the system remains secure. Additionally, if your business’s complexity is more general—such as managing roles, permissions, and user hierarchies that are common—a third-party solution can deliver the necessary functionality without the added burden of development.

In short, if your business requires high levels of customization and stringent security measures, consider building your services. However, if your requirements are standard and you value convenience and pre-built security, buying might be a better alternative.
Time to Market: How Urgent is the Need? "Ship fast!" is a common mission statement for many developers. Why? The faster you deliver your product to market, the higher the likelihood you are going to seize the largest piece of the market share pie. Bonus, if your product addresses a key pain point for users!

Essentially, if you need a solution up, and running quickly, purchasing is typically the faster route. Conversely, if your timeline allows for it, and you need a highly customized solution; then, building could be worth considering as a growth strategy.
Budget Considerations: Short-Term vs. Long-Term Costs: How big or small the operating capital account is, can influence which option you go with. Initially, building a custom solution may seem like a hefty investment since it requires you to dedicate your assets, upfront.

On the other hand, purchasing an off-the-shelf solution can appear more budget-friendly at first glance, with lower initial charges and predictable subscription fees. But as your business grows, those ongoing expenses can pile up quickly. So, make sure to review your financial landscape. Remember, irrespective of the option, you go with, the mission should be to attain your business goals while maintaining a healthy account.
Internal Resources: Do You Have the Right Team? Building an authorization solution that operates effectively at all levels of your infrastructure is no small feat. It demands the right blend of technical expertise and ample resources. Like any other development, authorization services have several moving parts—generally involving, designing the architecture, building the necessary services, integrating the solution into existing systems, and finally deploying to production.

If you already have a talented team equipped to tackle such a project, then building the solution may be a viable path. However, if your current resources are stretched thin or lacking the necessary skills, you might find it more beneficial to opt for a third-party solution. This way, you can shift the responsibility for development and maintenance to the vendor, freeing your internal team to focus on strategic initiatives that drive growth.

Conclusion: What’s the Best Choice for Your Business?

There’s no universal answer to the build vs. buy question. The best choice hinges on your business’s unique needs, including technical requirements and strategic goals.

A Balanced Approach: Hybrid Models and Modular Solutions

You might be wondering, “Should we consider a hybrid approach or a flexible alternative?” Well, a hybrid strategy often brings the best of both worlds. You can take advantage of off-the-shelf solutions for core functionality. This means you can achieve quick deployment and get your product to market faster.

At the same time, by building custom components for specialized needs, you maintain the flexibility to tailor your system to fit your unique requirements that vendor solutions might overlook, giving you a competitive edge while still enjoying the convenience of ready-made features.

On the flip side, utilizing modular solutions allows you to cherry-pick the best features from various offerings, creating a system that perfectly aligns with your business goals. With this approach, you can integrate the most effective components from different vendors, maximizing functionality without the burden of starting from scratch.

However, it's essential to consider the potential downsides, such as compatibility issues between different modules or the complexity of managing multiple vendors. Striking the right balance between customization and convenience can set your business up for success, so carefully evaluate your priorities and resources before making a decision.

Key Takeaways for Authorization Decisions in 2024

And that is just about it! We have looked at the dilemma from different points of view. Ultimately, the choice will hinge on your team's needs.

To recap, if you need a highly customized solution, building might be the way to go. However, if you’re looking for a quick deployment with must-have industry-standard functionality, purchasing an off-the-shelf solution could be your best bet.

With Permify, we provide a flexible and scalable authorization solution designed to support fine-grained authorization for complex permission requirements. Permify delivers lightning-fast response times for access checks, backed by a robust permissions database inspired by Google Zanzibar. Ready to explore how Permify can meet your product needs? Reach out today to schedule a demo!