The Real ROI of Auth0, Part 4: Maintenance

"It's often, I think, underestimated how much does go into identity and some of those parts of the platform."

John McKim, VP of Product & Technology, A Cloud Guru

““It’s often, I think, underestimated how much does go into identity and some of those parts of the platform,” @johncmckim, VP of Product & Technology, @acloudguru. Find out why Auth0 customers say they enjoy a reduction in identity maintenance costs.”

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Having to pause innovation to deal with identity maintenance is like trying to speed through your roadmap with the emergency brake on. You'll eventually get there, but it's likely to be an expensive (and slower) trip.

Identity is not something you solve once. Hackers continually create new ways to reach your customers' sensitive data. Software isn't static. While you're working on innovating, so is everybody else. And with the global digital evolution, every day changes how we interact with applications and software. That means your third-party integrations change — and not necessarily on your timetable. "If we needed to code [identity] ourselves, we'd be at the mercy of continuous maintenance, because as the social plugins change their APIs, we need to revise our code," says, Luis Salazar, Co-Founder, Non-Profit, Giving Compass.

Identity also evolves quickly as Auth0 Principal Architect Vittorio Bertocci explains in this brief (1:57 sec) video.

Can You Keep up Your Own Success?

Your software is integrated smoothly with three partners. Building on that success, your sales team goes out and snags another 10 — all with legacy systems and all want to be live within a month. Does your in-house team have the chops (and the time) to handle those integrations because you don't have time to hire all the talent you'll need. For Germany-based Siemens, eliminating the need for each individual business unit to solve identity offered increased efficiency. Hugo Francisco, Service Owner, points out “We believe the majority of the savings are being noticed and experienced on the application owner’s level, as they now do not have the responsibility of managing the identities of their users.”

Even if your team tells you they've solved the SAML problem, you can stall your own growth, says Cris Concepcion, former engineering manager Safari Books Online talking about their B2B expansion, "While there are standards for formats like SAML, the implementation of those standards varies widely. The more often you engage your core developers to support variations in your customers' identity systems, the slower you will be to sign deals and support the growth of your business."

Will Your Innovations Have to Wait?

Especially when you're protecting critical data, security comes first, if you've opted to build it yourself, this can mean your product is stuck waiting for innovations while your engineers keep everyone safe — or you spend the time and money to attract and keep staff with enough identity talent to build out your needs.

"Auth0 has really allowed us to get ahead of some of the challenges we would have faced by allowing us to create a central identity service at the beginning and start building new products attached to that instead of trying to shoehorn in a central user authentication method in the future. It will ideally not impact our customers in the long run, but give them a better experience right now by having a central identity that they can use across our platform and products, " says Steven Rogers, Chief Information and Security Officer, Ansarada.

Francis Lessard, Senior Front-End Developer, DashThis agrees: "The fact that we don't need to put any time into [identity] maintenance gives us the time to further improve [our] tool, making it even more user-friendly."

Can You Scale with Ease — and Speed?

You might need to accommodate service spikes around key events, like fuboTV during the Super Bowl, or maybe you need to adjust to a dramatic increase in applications due to a merger or your new business unit has successfully added hundreds of thousands of customers. Can your in-house team handle the rapid ramp up? You'd be fine with Auth0.

For SiteMinder, which now processes more than 87 million hotel bookings each year (a rate of 166 per minute) for its 30,000 hotel customers across the globe, that ability to seamless serve customers make a huge difference."Irrespective of however many applications our customers choose to subscribe to within the platform, they now have a single login and authentication system to go through; that's Auth0," says Mike Rogers, CTO and Co-Founder, SiteMinder.

Many Auth0 customers enjoy a decrease in the time it takes to onboard a new business unit or partner. For Servcorp, that meant reducing the time to onboard a new application from "weeks to around a day." For Cimpress, that means onboarding new businesses in five minutes. "It was very much a wow moment for these two fairly large companies to be able to integrate our e-commerce technologies that quickly. We're internally contrasting that against five years ago when that kind of stuff took a huge amount of time and energy. BuildASign has been a fantastic story to showcase why we're using Auth0," Ryan Breen, Director API Management, Cimpress.

Solving identity challenges that come with business growth can mean an increase in staff. Depending on the size of the enterprise, we often hear that customers would require and additional two to eight full-time developers. "We were running into issues in production with managing JWT tokens and managing new services over time... figuring out how to manage expiry. Other questions we had were, 'Do we store it in the cookies in the browser? Do we store it on the server? Do we session cache it?' All these questions that Auth0 just comes in and answers for you. It'd probably take at least two full-time developers to initially build that and continue to maintain it, depending on how quickly we scale," says Lucas Klaassen, Full Stack Web Developer, WineDirect

Where's Your Focus?

Is your dev team able to focus entirely on your core mission or is identity pulling their focus? As Rogers explains, "Doing what Auth0 does in-house would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars each year, and that's just to manage the service and keep it running. To roll out additional features, that cost would rise directly in proportion to the number of features we would want to add and how many developers we would need to make it happen. Anytime Auth0 releases a feature, that's something we don't have to do ourselves. Ultimately, that benefits not only us, but the hotel customers that rely on us to continue supporting them through our own enhancements and innovations."

“Maintenance isn’t just patching. Many Auth0 customers enjoy a decrease in the time it takes to onboard a new business unit or partner, which strengthens their return on their identity investment.”

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Resources

The Real ROI of Auth0 The Real ROI of Auth0, Part 1: Time To Market
The Real ROI of Auth0, Part 2: Innovation
The Real ROI of Auth0, Part 3: Security
The Real ROI of Auth0, Part 4: Maintenance (you're reading Part 4)

Docs: Customers often cite the benefit of our clear documentation and Jumpstarts. Get started here.

Questions? Please reach out to an Auth0 Resource if you'd like to learn how we can support your specific project or digital transformation.