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B2B Partner Integrations

Onboard B2B partners with different access levels, strong authentication, quotas, and self-service docs and try-it.

Practical use cases

Concrete ways teams use Zerq for this scenario.

  • Onboard a new partner in minutes, not weeks

    Partner signs up in your developer portal, gets credentials (or uses certificates you approve), and sees only the API products they’re allowed. They can try endpoints in the browser and download docs. You set their limits once; the gateway enforces them and you get a full audit of their usage.

  • Give high-value partners stronger assurance

    Use client certificates or stricter auth for critical partners; optional IP allowlists for extra lock-down. Same gateway and audit trail for everyone, with different assurance levels per partner.

  • See exactly which partner is failing or over limit

    Logs and metrics are per partner and product. When a partner reports errors or you see spikes, you filter by their access level and endpoint to debug. No more guessing which integration is misbehaving.

Outcomes

  • Faster partner onboarding with self-service and scoped docs.
  • Per-partner access and quotas with clear audit and visibility.
  • Fewer support tickets; consistent auth and limits across partners.

How Zerq helps

  • Token and certificate validation: validate JWTs from your IdP or custom issuers; optional client certificate (mTLS) authentication for partners.
  • Per-partner access: each partner is an access level with its own product set and quotas; IP allowlists for additional restriction.
  • Developer portal with passwordless sign-in (magic link); partners see only the API products they are allowed to use; try-it and OpenAPI download.
  • Credential encryption and key rotation; environment-referenced secrets so partner secrets or upstream keys stay out of config.
  • Full audit trail and structured logs by partner and product; Prometheus metrics for usage and errors per partner.
  • Workflow designer to implement partner-specific logic (e.g. header injection, routing by partner tier) without custom gateway code.
For architects & evaluators (technical context, requirements)

Technical context

B2B API programs require the gateway to act as the policy enforcement point (PEP) while an authorization server or internal system acts as the policy decision point (PDP). Partners are onboarded with different access levels; auth is often mTLS (for high assurance and easy revocation via cert rotation), JWT (for low-latency validation), or opaque tokens with introspection. Rate limiting, per-partner quotas, and full audit of who called what are standard. Self-service developer portals reduce onboarding friction.

Technical requirements

  • Per-partner authentication: mTLS, JWT, or token introspection; optional IP allowlists.
  • Per-partner quotas and rate limits; clear usage and error visibility per partner.
  • Self-service portal: sign-up, keys/certs, API docs, try-it-in-browser.
  • Audit trail of partner access and configuration changes for compliance.
  • High availability and scalable data plane for many partners.

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