ChaosSearch helps businesses create order out of the chaos of unorganized S3 data lakes. Their fully managed SaaS platform turns these large, unstructured repositories of raw data into organized search and analytics platform. “We’re Google for Amazon S3, for lack of a better term,” says Founder and CTO Thomas Hazel. Their patent-pending index technology and architecture greatly reduces the cost and complexity of data analytics, “With most solutions out there, as data doubles in size, so does your costs. We at ChaosSearch provide unlimited access and only charge by daily ingestion, where our costs are half of our competition.”

Thanks to a strong team of engineers, ChaosSearch was well-versed at building everything in-house. But after a period of rapid growth, including a series A funding round, they found their resources were stretched thin. They needed an identity solution that lets them keep onboarding new customers without stealing focus from their core competency. They began to look for a solution that was easy to implement but also secure and trustworthy so they could continue to meet the needs of their most security-conscious customers.

Customer Demand for Federated Identity Support

After receiving funding, ChaosSearch moved from the build-out phase to actually signing customers. This meant opening themselves up to customer feedback. One demand stood out —  Single Sign On (SSO). This issue intensified as their services grew. “Provisioning users at scale can be a real nightmare,” says Hazel. He began to realize that SSO was going to be a non-negotiable as many of their potential clients had an internal set-up that required multiple user logins. If ChaosSearch couldn’t provide that capability, they risked losing business.

A Trustworthy Identity Service Solution

The team didn’t want to detract from their core focus of data organization by spending time and resources building their own identity service. They also realized that anything they put together would be less secure than outsourcing to a proven expert, and might put their user’s data at risk. “We focus on our core competency, database technology and distributed systems.”

They discovered Auth0 via the Amazon Web Services Partner Network. As both businesses are built on AWS, it was a natural fit. This is a great embodiment of how businesses in the AWS community are working together to drive further cloud adoption and efficiency.

This wasn’t a decision taken lightly. ChaosSearch incorporates very few outside services into their infrastructure. Auth0 is “the fourth component in a very simple, though powerful, architecture.” In particular, outsourcing security requires an exceptional level of trust and due diligence. “Our simplified architecture has very few moving parts, so we scrutinize every third party component. We integrated with Auth0 because it delivers significant value to our platform and customers."

Better Service and Increased Productivity

Through Auth0’s services, ChaosSearch is now capable of accommodating any potential customer requirements for enterprise federation. “The integration allows our customers to specify the protocol they want, and Auth0 handles all the details quickly.” Individualized sign-on has made it much easier for customer success agents to identify who is having issues and why: “It used to take us half an hour to figure out who was doing what. Now it takes a second, providing us with at least a 10x increase in productivity.”

Auth0 Increases End-User Security, Saves Employees’ Time

With Auth0, ChaosSearch was able to solve their federated identity support issue and quickly move on to other aspects of building their platform. Offering SSO will continue to save them time as the company scales: “It's great because our customers are happy with the ease and speed of our setup. And from a customer success perspective, we are better able to help our customers.”

With this issue taken care of, ChaosSearch can focus on their real goals: “We're on a mission to make petabyte-scale data accessible without having to break the bank.”

Read the AWS case study to learn more about how Auth0 and AWS helped ChaosSearch by simplifying identity related challenges.