Challenge: You’re a nonprofit or startup, or maybe even both, with digital experiences— such as an app or a website—and your team wants to implement a third-party user authentication solution with solid security.
If you oversee authentication and authorization at a nonprofit or a startup, the roadblocks to implementing a third-party solution might be endless. Whether you’re a nonprofit trying to reduce non-program expenses or a startup with a limited budget considering rolling your own user authentication, choosing an off-the-shelf solution will allow you to spend even more time focusing on your mission and core product. This means getting your app to market faster and providing a secure experience to your users, donors, volunteers, community members, and more.
Species360, a Global Leader in Wildlife Care and Conservation
Species360, an NGO and global leader in wildlife care and conservation, is an example of a nonprofit organization that transitioned its in-house solution to Auth0 by Okta. “Species360 combines passion-based, non-profit operating principles with cutting-edge software development.” (species360.org) As a tech-forward nonprofit, it started its journey with Auth0 through our Auth0 for Startups program and then leveraged our Okta for Good preferential pricing and support. Learn more about Species360’s journey with Okta here. In this article, we’ll dive into Species360’s assessment and implementation processes.
Assessment
Species360 wanted to remove Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) from its plate and didn’t want to worry about building anything except for a few customizations. Species360’s acquisition of Hortis, the plant collection platform that already used Auth0, influenced the team’s decision to outsource and enabled them to get up and running quickly. “I felt it was better to focus more on the hard cost of outsourcing it [user authentication] to a company that does it as well as we would want to do it anyways.” - Clint Pidlubny, Director of Technology, Species360.
Implementation
In order to modernize its ZIMS (Zoological Information Management System) platform, Species360 is overhauling its legacy application software and rearchitecting the future version of its current platform. In parallel to updating its current platform, Species360 is also building a new version of the platform. As the team continued their setup and interacted with the Auth0 APIs and the React SDKs, they decided to fully integrate Auth0 into the new version.
The Species360 team felt that getting the platform set up and configured was simple on their end. For this, they relied on the Deploy CLI Tool - an Auth0-provided tool that helps you manage your Auth0 tenant configuration, integrating into your development workflows as a standalone CLI or as a node module. They leveraged the tool and SDKs to ensure that the progression between environments could be done programmatically.
Valuable Features
In addition, Species360 leveraged Universal Login and Enterprise Connections for its larger and more sophisticated members who preferred a streamlined user experience with SSO connectivity. Species360 also benefits from these features because sometimes its members have different security standards than it does. Auth0 Enterprise Connections allow users to authenticate with an external, federated identity provider (IdP) such as Azure AD, Google Workspace, PingFederate, and more.
Today, Species360 uses Enterprise Connections on both its Zims and Hortis platforms. In fact, on the Hortis platform, that feature has allowed the team to win business where SSO connectivity was a requirement.
Species360 has also configured SMTP Email Providers, so it can integrate Auth0 capabilities with Microsoft 365 and send emails through its usual email provider.
Conclusion
We’re always interested in learning from our customers - specifically, what advice they would give to someone looking to implement user authentication for the first time. Clint rolled his own auth in the past and said, “APIs are ubiquitous…There’s almost a service for everything. The idea is that I can… get into a startup program—or have access to bring on however many users for free and outsource some of these complex pieces so I don't have to think about them.” His advice is simple: developers should look externally to see who’s done this better and then leverage that capability.
“We’re not in the business of user management; we’re in the business of data management for the animal species and our members' facilities. I don't want my team to have to spend an hour a month thinking about the user management side of things because, for us, that's not the value we’re creating.”
– Clint Pidlubny
Director of Technology
Species360
Get Started Today
Auth0 by Okta has discounted offerings for nonprofits and startups alike. We want to help extend your team’s capacity and give your customers, members, donors, volunteers, and communities a secure and flexible way to access your services. Start building today.