How Companies are Using IAM as a Catalyst for Digital Transformation
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How Companies
are Using IAM as a
Catalyst for Digital
Transformation
auth0.com
©Auth0 2020 | The 2020 State of Application Assembly 1It’s hard to find a company that isn’t investing in digital transformation in 2020. Particularly in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has forced us all to adapt the way we work and interact, digital transformation is here to stay. Indeed, the pandemic has forced many organizations to expedite and expand their digital transformation projects to meet rapidly evolving customer needs. Digital transformation is gathering speed A recent Zsclarer study found that a full 75% of CEOs have sped up digital transformation initiatives in response to COVID-19. One example is Auth0 customer Lifen, an AI-powered startup that helps patients, providers, and health systems securely share medical information. Lifen asked Auth0 to help them replace their existing identity infrastructure to facilitate building a contact tracing solution. Auth0 delivered in just five days, enabling Lifen to speed the creation of time-sensitive technology that’s now in the hands of multiple healthcare institutions. The pandemic has also exposed what Fortune calls a performance “chasm” between companies who have been investing in new technologies to activate modern business models and companies who haven’t. In late 2019, Accenture surveyed more than 8,300 companies to understand their organizational culture and the adoption and penetration rates for new technologies. Accenture found that the top 10% of organizations grew revenue twice as fast as the bottom 25%, correlating revenue growth with digital investment. Identity is essential for successful digital adaptation As companies accelerate their digital transformation timelines, many are finding that identity and access management (IAM) is essential to the speed and success of their endeavors. They’re also recognizing that IAM implementation is complex, work-intensive, and fraught with risk. Simply put, getting IAM right can make or break a digital transformation initiative. Successful digital transformation projects incorporate IAM from the beginning. As businesses slowly recover from the effects of the pandemic, they will face a backlog of IT projects and limited cash with which to accomplish them. In response, according to Gartner, CIOs are likely to focus spending on subscriptions and cloud services in an effort to lower costs. The infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) space is projected to grow by 13.4% to $50.4 billion in 2020 and 27.6% to $64.3 billion in 2021. Thanks to ongoing remote workplace requirements, spending on cloud-based conferencing services is expected to rise by almost 47% in 2020. Investing in a dedicated IAM solution increases the chances that digital transformation investments like these will pay off, rather than creating headaches for your users and sunk costs for your company. In recent years, Auth0 has been collecting stories from customers about how they approach digital transformation as well as how they handle the identity component of their transformation. What follows is a collection of those stories that illuminates how and why managing identity is a critical step in your digital transformation journey. ©Auth0 2020 | IAM as a Catalyst for Digital Transformation 2
Outgrowing a home-grown IAM solution kickstarts digital transformation Babylon Health, the UK’s leading digital healthcare service, is committed to making health services accessible and affordable to everyone. Babylon’s technology connects patients and doctors remotely, allowing patients to receive healthcare from home, including checkups, followups, prescriptions, and ongoing tests. With the reality of COVID-19, remote healthcare literally saves lives. But in order to do that, Babylon needed to provide convenient and HIPAA-compliant login to 300,000 doctors and patients. Stable, robustly secure IAM became a priority. Babylon’s experience of outgrowing their bespoke authentication solution will sound familiar to many other Auth0 customers. Their identity system had evolved organically over time in response to new requirements. Every new engineer had to take time to learn the quirks of the brittle and confusing authentication system — time that could have been spent adding value to Babylon-specific solutions. Plus, the time it took to integrate Babylon’s authentication solution with their partners’ customized solutions made scalability a huge challenge. “Our solution wasn’t really suitable for the growth that we expect, and it was limited in functionality,” reports senior software engineer Jay Anslow. “Some of our partners produced their own apps, which have their own custom authentication systems, so we needed to be able to integrate our software with theirs.” In short, Babylon’s identity solution fell short of the speed, scalability, and user experience requirements of their digital healthcare initiatives. After a careful build vs. buy analysis, Babylon chose Auth0 to help them deliver an easy, secure login experience for their users. Since that initial use case, Babylon has begun using Auth0’s machine-to-machine (M2M) tokens to authenticate client credentials between system components. The ability to quickly onboard partners and facilitate communication between systems has empowered Babylon to scale with minimal growing pains. Today, their Auth0 deployment supports 300,000+ active users and counting. “We’re actually able to focus on delivering Babylon-specific services, rather than having to build out what is a solved problem,” says Anslow. Digital transformation drives outstanding CX Naranja, Argentina’s leading credit card provider, needed a strong identity strategy to support its digital evolution into a customer-centric ecosystem of products and services. As Javier Voos, Naranja’s Head of Engineering, puts it, “We are rethinking and moving our products to the digital space, increasing our ecosystem organisms and their interactions exponentially. For us, all the initiatives related to Naranja’s digital evolution must be customer-centric, providing an outstanding user experience based on usability, personalization, and awesome response time.” ©Auth0 2020 | IAM as a Catalyst for Digital Transformation 3
For users to realize the full value of Naranja’s online ecosystem, the company needed to provide a secure, frictionless login experience across every platform under its digital umbrella. After all, as Voos put it, “The main idea behind the Naranja ecosystem is to provide the best experience — to our customers, making sure that our digital platform provides all the resources that an online business needs for success; and hence support the ecosystem evolution.” To deliver this exceptional experience, Naranja realized that they needed a strong authentication service with powerful extensibility to accommodate future growth. It didn’t make sense for Naranja to commit time, budget, and personnel to managing identity when their focus should be on their expanding business offerings. That’s why they chose Auth0 to solve their authentication challenges. “When we started this mission,” explains Voos, “we needed to have all the security concerns already solved by another company. We don’t want to spend budget on trying to develop those features in-house so we were looking for a global leader for Identity-as-a-Service (IDaaS) solutions. This is the reason that we went with Auth0.” Auth0’s IAM solution has proven pivotal in enabling Naranja to deliver on the convenience, security, and ease of use they promise their partners and customers. Digital transformation helps build sustainable growth Globally recognized industrial manufacturer Siemens develops technology that drives innovation in manufacturing, healthcare, energy, and infrastructure. For a huge organization like Siemens, composed of many individually operating companies, mapping a strategy for sustainable internal growth is vital. Hugo Francisco, Service Owner of Siemens ID for Siemens, put it like this: “The importance of having a sustainable business is growing exponentially and that has to be taken into account when performing business on such a global scale.” Siemens recognized that finding a scalable way to manage identity would be a foundational step in building sustainable growth. They needed to secure and systematize their login processes across platforms — no easy feat with hundreds of departments, divisions, and applications around the world. Auth0 helped them build Siemens ID, a unified login service that can be quickly and painlessly integrated into each operating company’s stack. With Auth0 providing the necessary identity services, Siemens was able to streamline and simplify its large-scale rollout of Siemens ID. “When Auth0 stepped in,” Francisco explains, “we could improve the processes around identity management, reducing efforts while increasing the acceptance of the internal stakeholders.” Now, every Siemens customer and partner uses Siemens ID to access hundreds of applications and services without compromising on either security or ease of use. And instead of focusing on identity and compliance issues, Siemens security teams can concentrate on continuous improvement for their own services. Crucially, as Siemens continues to grow and expand its service offerings, the identity service they built with Auth0 will grow along with them. As Francisco says, “Adaptability will always be the key factor to success and in the past two years, we proved that to be true.” ©Auth0 2020 | IAM as a Catalyst for Digital Transformation 4
Streamline legacy code with digital transformation
Kiva is an international crowdfunding nonprofit whose focus is expanding financial access to help
underserved communities around the world thrive. With Kiva, lenders can provide direct assistance
to those in need: in total, $1 billion and counting. Many of the loans go to women in poverty-stricken
communities who are the main providers for their families.
Like Babylon Health, Kiva had built their own authentication solution in-house over time, adding
functionality when they needed it to meet business requirements. The system relied on basic username/
password authentication and Facebook integration. This approach put enormous pressure on what Van
Mittal-Henkle, Principal Software Engineer at Kiva, ruefully called their “monolithic codebase.” Kiva knew
they needed to replatform to a microservices architecture with a dedicated identity service to support
future growth.
As Mittal-Henkle reflects, “The question was, do we want to spend the time and resources to build that
[IAM solution] ourselves, or do we want to find a solution that will meet our needs without having to
expend the engineering resources? And that’s where Auth0 came in. They provided us with a platform that
enabled us to rearchitect our system without spending the time and resources to build it ourselves.”
With Auth0’s IAM service, Kiva was able to eliminate more than 22,000 lines of code, freeing up
engineering resources considerably. This allowed Kiva to focus their engineering efforts on core business
functions, rather than on managing identity. “By enabling native social authentication, our app’s Facebook
login times have been reduced by 50% compared to web authentication,” says Eric Jensen, Lead Mobile
Engineer at Kiva. “And successful Facebook logins in our app have increased by 16%.”
This newfound agility also sets up successful mobile implementation, which is timely, since Kiva is looking
to expand their user base by cultivating a bigger presence in the mobile space. Unifying the authentication
function across platforms with a specialized identity provider like Auth0 allows Kiva to shift and scale with
minimal friction.
Key takeaways for decision-makers
As a business decision-maker, you need to know what questions to ask your team to understand whether
your existing identity solution can scale with your digital transformation goals. Here are some suggestions
to start the conversation:
1. Does our current IAM solution have the scalability and extensibility to meet our needs as we
grow? Or does adding functionality demand a huge engineering lift and create extra friction for
users?
2. Are we focusing too many engineering resources on solving identity and compliance problems,
at the cost of our core business functions?
©Auth0 2020 | IAM as a Catalyst for Digital Transformation 53. Can our IAM system integrate with our partners’ customized authentication solutions, or is
integration a time-consuming and risky process?
4. Does our digital ecosystem deliver the best possible experience to customers? In particular, is
login secure and frictionless, or is it so high-friction that it drives users away?
Stop worrying about IAM within a month
Auth0 acts as an intermediary between your business and the complexity of IAM. We take the
authentication function off your hands, so you can focus on delivering more value for your customers.
That’s why Auth0 has 9,000+ customers across more than 70 countries. We support 4.5 million login
transactions per month with 24/7 coverage.
To learn more about how IAM can help you reach your digital transformation milestones, schedule an
identity consultation with the Auth0 team.
©Auth0 2020 | IAM as a Catalyst for Digital Transformation 6About Auth0
Auth0 provides a platform to authenticate, authorize, and secure access for applications, devices,
and users. Security and development teams rely on Auth0’s simplicity, extensibility, and expertise
to make identity work for everyone. Safeguarding more than 4.5 billion login transactions each
month, Auth0 secures identities so innovators can innovate, and empowers global enterprises to
deliver trusted, superior digital experiences to their customers around the world.
For more information, visit www.auth0.com or follow @auth0 on Twitter.
© Auth0 2020
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