Four Ways CIAM Empowers Your Business

With people not only working but also shopping, banking, socializing, and receiving healthcare via digital platforms, identity management has become not just a competitive advantage but a requirement. Organizations across industries need to manage identity in a secure, scalable, and seamless way. Part of the challenge is that identity is disseminated across multiple applications and devices, effectively making identity itself the perimeter. To satisfy user expectations and meet business needs in this new ecosystem, organizations are embracing third-party identity-as-a-service (IDaaS) solutions like Auth0.

At the core of the IDaaS space is identity and access management (IAM), which involves authenticating users’ identities and controlling their access to online resources. A key enabler for organizations undergoing digital transformation, IAM encompasses:

• Authentication, or how you determine whether someone’s claimed identity matches their actual identity. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is increasingly recognized as the standard method of authenticating identity.
• Authorization, or the allocation of permissions to individual users or types of users. For instance, if an administrator leaves your organization, you can revoke their permissions; you can also add users or expand permissions according to your needs.

Typically, organizations have to manage identity for different types of users: customers, employees, and enterprise partners. Because each type of user has different priorities and expectations of your platform, each type demands its own carefully calibrated balance of convenience, privacy, and security. For example, your employees and contractors will probably put up with time-consuming, headache-inducing processes to get paid and access other benefits because they have few alternatives. Customers, on the other hand, have lots of choices, and if you can’t deliver a swift, effortless login experience, they’ll find one of your competitors who can.

Customer identity and access management (CIAM) platforms are built to optimize the balance between convenience, privacy, and security for each type of user. With the right CIAM platform, you can:

• Deliver a secure and frictionless login experience
• Guide compliance with data privacy laws
• Protect data assets against malicious intrusion
• Derive more specific, meaningful insights from customer data

Using four Auth0 customers as examples, let’s explore how CIAM can help you allocate resources more effectively, secure identity across your entire infrastructure, and deliver more value to your users.

In our new whitepaper, we delve more deeply into each of these customer stories and suggest strategies for choosing and implementing the right CIAM platform. If you find this content useful, be sure to download the full whitepaper or check out some of our other identity resources.

Enable Expanding Use Cases

With 170 superstores across the UK, furniture retailer Dunelm describes themselves as “product-obsessed.” In 2018, they began a massive digital overhaul of their existing internal infrastructure in favor of a modern, flexible cloud data platform that would transform the digital experience for their customers, employees, and external vendors.

A key aspect of Dunelm’s buy-rather-than-build approach to their digital infrastructure was replacing their in-house identity system with Auth0. This move has saved them significant time, effort, and staffing costs.

Initially, Dunelm planned to use Auth0 for straightforward customer authentication, but they soon incorporated the service into multiple business operations serving customers, employees, and partners.

From here, Dunelm plans to further expand its Auth0 use case and add more customer value through personalized, frictionless shopping experiences.

Centralize Identity across Platforms

UK-based conditioning brand Gymshark is one of the most recognizable functional training apparel brands in the world, with a social media following of 10+ million and customers in over 170 countries. During the development process for their conditioning app, Gymshark realized they needed a centralized authentication solution that worked across both their online and mobile applications. They had one major priority: a seamless customer experience.

While they briefly considered building their own solution, Gymshark ultimately decided to entrust Auth0 with their CIAM needs. With Auth0 handing IAM for customers and employees, Gymshark can focus on creating apps and other technology that advances their core mission. Auth0 is a critical enabler for Gymshark’s tech-powered, user-centric future.

Replatform and Eliminate Legacy Code

Kiva is an international crowdfunding nonprofit focused on expanding financial access to help underserved communities around the world thrive. Kiva had built their own authentication solution in-house over time, adding functionality when they needed it to meet business requirements, but they knew they needed to replatform to a microservice architecture with a dedicated identity service to support future growth.

With Auth0, Kiva was able to eliminate more than 22,000 lines of legacy code, freeing up engineering resources considerably and allowing the company to focus its efforts on core business functions rather than on managing identity. Investing in CIAM now also prepares Kiva for successful mobile implementation, which is key to their growth strategy. The bottom line: CIAM enables Kiva to shift and scale securely and with minimal friction.

Achieve Smooth Scalability

TVNZ, New Zealand’s state-owned, commercially funded broadcaster, reaches more than two million New Zealanders every day. TVNZ also offers OnDemand streaming services that reach up to half of the country’s five million citizens with 2.5 million registered accounts. At a moment in history when a trustworthy news source is more important than ever, the broadcaster needed a CIAM partner who could help them rapidly scale, migrate users, and maintain their reputation.

When they signed on with Auth0 to handle authentication for their OnDemand streaming web and mobile platforms, TVNZ was faced with the task of migrating data for 2.5 million accounts. To avoid forcing all of their customers into a password reset, TVNZ opted for an automatic migration in which customer data was migrated only when a person logged in.

But another challenge lay ahead. TVNZ’s digital platforms faced unprecedented demand during the pandemic lockdown, with weekly streaming rates jumped by 50% and tens of thousands of users logging in more or less simultaneously to watch Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s daily addresses. With Auth0 handling their identity needs, TVNZ experienced “no real issues,” reported Michael Robinson, Head of Digital Capability at TVNZ. Entrusting CIAM to Auth0 allows TVNZ to stay on mission and maximize the value of their development resources.

What Challenges Could CIAM Solve for You?

Is your login process so painless that customers barely register it? Do your customers trust you to handle their personal information? Do you have all the insights into customer behavior you need? Are you confident that your customer identity solution can scale in response to escalating demand without lags or outages? Unless the answer to all of these questions is an unambiguous “Yes!” (in which case, nice work!), investing in CIAM is a sound decision.

Ask yourself what your team could accomplish if they didn’t have to worry about managing customer identity and access. For a closer look at the customer stories we’ve summarized here, and to learn more about how CIAM can enable digital transformation at your organization, download the whitepaper.