How Partners Make Authentication and Authorization Even Better

One of the great things about offering an extensive authentication platform is seeing how other companies extend and augment it with their own unique solutions. As Auth0’s ecosystem of partners grows, so too does the value we deliver to existing customers already invested in our service. An investment made to address one area of a customer’s business quickly finds an accelerated ROI when another part of the business soon realizes how they too can leverage the platform either directly or through a point solution provided by an Auth0 partner.

A great example is Grean - an Auth0 technology partner based out of Denmark. Managing Director Niels Flensted-Jensen and his team has done a remarkable job understanding the business of their predominantly B2B enterprise customers and identifying complex and unwieldy processes that are core to the customer’s success yet not their core-business. The end result? Grean has extracted some of these processes away from the customer by rolling them into a niche managed service and offering it back to customers on a subscription basis.

Grean extends Auth0 with B2B onboarding and authorization.

Essentially, Grean extends Auth0 with a layer of B2B onboarding and authorization capabilities. It’s a service for B2B applications – web, mobile or APIs – designed and built to work with Auth0. Together the two form a complete authentication and authorization solution for business to business collaboration.

Let me hand over to Flensted-Jensen to explain further…

--- So maybe you work at an insurance company and you manage a web application serving brokerage firms. Maybe your company works with fifty brokerage firms, maybe even a thousand. And most of the brokerage firms have several users in different capacities: most work as brokers proper, a few are in finance, one is a manager having access to all accounts, others work just with a subset of customers.

And these are some of your challenges:

• You need a way of getting each brokerage firm on board the web app,
• You need to authenticate their users in a way that’s convenient to them and secure enough to you,
• You need a way for the firms to manage the permissions of the users in the context of your application.

A full onboarding, authentication and authorization solution

Grean manages everything related to onboarding of business partners and their employees. Subsequently Grean provides management of access roles, that is, how each business partner and their employees are allowed to use your web, mobile, and API applications.

Grean was built to work seamlessly with Auth0 by integrating into the authentication flow, independent of actual authentication method. Put simply, Auth0 determines who you are, Grean determines which organization you belong to and what you will be allowed to do in the context of that organization and the application you are using.

“Grean was built to work seamlessly with Auth0 by integrating into the authentication flow”

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“Auth0 determines who you are, Grean determines which organization you belong to and what you will be allowed to do.”

So getting back to our insurance company example (in fact this is not so much an example as it is a generalization of an actual existing customer - RSA Scandinavia, part of global, UK based insurance company RSA) we are able to address the three challenging areas you face:

1. Onboarding of organizations. Your partners and customers should be easy to onboard - either by your invitation or automatically.
2. Each business partner should be recognized as such: You manage what their organization can do, and they then manage what each of their users will be able to do with your applications.
3. When signing in through Auth0, the user information must be augmented with information about their organization and the user’s authorizations as assigned through the previous steps.

Grean couples with Auth0 to deliver all these features and provide a full business-to-business authentication and authorization solution.

Easy to get started if you’re an existing Auth0 customer.

It’s easy to integrate Grean into your existing Auth0 tenants. Once you’ve signed up for Grean, you will be provided with a small piece of Javascript code to add as a rule to your Auth0 authentication pipeline.

Grean can also provide instructions on how to embed the user management UI into your web applications for your partners to use.

To learn more about Grean and Auth0, check out this post over on Grean’s site.