The future of education is one where each student can thrive thanks to learning experiences individualized for their needs. Alef Education, a leading K-12 education technology company that is changing the way students are educated, is on a mission to help get there by customizing learning for different types of learners so that everyone gets the level of care they need. 

The company uses artificial intelligence (AI) to provide personalized learning experiences to students through a trio of online products: the Alef Platform, Abjadiyat, and Curio.

Alef Education’s main challenge was connecting over 60,000 students, teachers, and principals on one platform. Amjad Khan, Director of Technology at Alef Education, says, “We wanted to have an integrated platform for our students and teachers, and to ensure that when they sign in, they only had one single login. That was the key project.”

A Custom SSO Solution Would Require Full-Time Engineers

Alef Education needed a way to seamlessly connect students across its suite of products. “For students, it's difficult because we don't want them to memorize a login for their device, then a login for Google Suite, then a login for the Alef Platform, then a login for Curio,” says Khan.

However, Alef Education quickly realized that building their own solution would not be a good use of their resources. Khan recalls, “We would probably have allocated at least two engineers full-time” to create custom authentication software. “There's no point in building a complete security system if I can buy something off the shelf for a fraction of the price,” says Khan, adding that the do-it-yourself route could take years.

Alef Education turned to Auth0 to facilitate secure Single Sign On (SSO) to all of their platforms, connecting all their users in a data-driven e-learning environment.

Integrations in Hours Instead of Weeks

It was not easy finding the right authentication software, and Alef Education was very thorough. They wanted a solution that could handle enterprise-scale security concerns, scale quickly, and also had all the bells and whistles that could help them stay ahead of security issues. “We looked at everything and Auth0 came on top in terms of the features it could give us within our two to three-month time frame.”

Alef Education was able to implement Auth0 as their SSO solution across all platforms in a couple of months. “Having something like Auth0 here allows us to expedite and minimize the amount of time it takes to set up a new integration. It just takes a matter of hours,” says Khan.

He highlighted that Auth0 was a faster solution than other providers for new integrations. “I was told 15 days just recently from a provider installation, and with Auth0 it took a day. That's it, no more than a day.” This allowed Alef Education to concentrate on product development, explains Khan, saying, “Our focus should be on education.”

The Added Benefit of Strong Security

For a company dealing with user passwords and personal information, security was also a prime focus. Khan explains, “We pride ourselves in having a secure platform,” adding that, when it comes to authentication, “we want to work with enterprise-level products.”

Alef Education uses Auth0 Logs to monitor authentications performed by its users and identify suspicious activity. “We are able to see abnormalities in user authentication by using the logs from Auth0,” says Khan. This allows Khan and his team to gain the trust of students and teachers alike, connecting multiple e-learning tools in a single platform while protecting user data.

Alef Education Scaled to 60K Users And Counting

Moving forward, Alef Education has plans to continue growing with Auth0. “We know Auth0 can scale. We know it can scale up to millions of users if needed, but it also has a huge amount of features and services which we have yet to utilize, everything from multi-factor authentication to being able to detect breaches,” says Khan.

Khan explains that the company aims to use Auth0 to integrate more e-learning tools, saying, “The more platforms that we add, the more we want to make sure that, for our users, we minimize the amount of complexity to just have one single username and password. Auth0 is helping us develop our educational ecosystem.” Instead of worrying about security, Alef Education can focus on transforming the education sector.