B2B IAM Overview

B2B IAM (Business-to-Business Identity and Access Management) handles authentication and authorization for applications where your customers are organizations, not just individual users. This adds complexity: you need to manage organizations (tenants), their members, roles within those organizations, and often integrate with your customers' existing identity providers.

Ory's stack supports B2B IAM patterns:

• Ory Kratos — manages user identities, authentication flows (registration, login, password reset, MFA, social sign-in, SSO, passkeys), and account management.
• Ory Hydra — provides OAuth2/OIDC for secure API access and machine-to-machine authentication between services.
• Ory Keto — models complex organizational permissions (user X is admin of organization Y, organization Y has access to resource Z) using relationship-based access control.
• Ory Oathkeeper — enforces tenant isolation at the API layer, ensuring users only access their organization's data.
• Ory Polis — provides enterprise SSO via SAML 2.0 and OIDC, abstracting protocol complexity into a standard OAuth 2.0 flow. Supports directory sync via SCIM for automatic user provisioning/deprovisioning, plus multi-tenancy and self-service SSO configuration for your enterprise customers.

The key B2B patterns that Ory supports include multi-tenancy (isolating customer data), organization hierarchies, role-based access within organizations, delegated administration (letting your customers manage their own users), and enterprise SSO onboarding via SAML 2.0 and OIDC federation.

Why Ory for B2B?

B2B customers expect enterprise-grade identity features—SAML SSO, directory sync, audit logs, compliance certifications. Building SAML support alone can take months of XML parsing and certificate management. Ory Polis abstracts this complexity, letting you implement enterprise SSO in days instead of months while staying flexible enough to match your specific tenant and permissions model.