Basic Auth and Exchange Online – February 2020 Update

doshea No, im not employed by Microsoft, nor am i a partner or reseller. Im a customer, much like yourself by the sounds of it.

There is very clear evidence (not just from Microsoft) that a single factor of authentication (username/password) is simply inadequate in this day and age. New capabilities like Multi Factor Authentication is a more modern approach to authenticating (again, this [OAUTH] is an open standard that's not developed by Microsoft). Microsoft is simply forcing this because single factors are not adequate. 3rd party apps have the choice to use it, and its all documented. If they choose not to, then you will have to find a different app.

Your expectations of SaaS need to be re-aligned because this is not what you get with SaaS. There are many examples where your theory is not correct. .Ecommerce sites offered as SaaS have forced customers to change because they were shifting their product in a different direction. Salesforce has just recently enforced MFA across all accounts, irrespective of user or service accounts. Google is in the rollout process to force MFA for all of their gmail users, and with great success. All of these impact the user.

If you dont want to deal with the changes you have the choice to run your own infrastructure and maintain it. This of course is proven to be more costly, unreliable and insecure. The choice however is still yours.