When COVID-19 shook businesses around the world, millions of workers began working remotely, but few companies were prepared to transition away from traditional work environments. Organization, management, and collaboration posed major challenges to newly remote companies of all sizes.

“Small businesses use on average 100+ apps across an increasing amount of remote team members,” explains Rolf Larsen, CEO and founder of Desktop.com. “With app usage increasing and in this new way of working, a long-term way to effectively manage this kind of digital work environment as a whole is much needed.”

As a fully remote company, Desktop.com understands digital collaboration, but before it launched in March 2021, it needed identity management that could connect and protect its users.

Strict Standards for Selecting Identity Management

Desktop.com is a Europe-based company with customers around the globe, so GDPR adherence was a necessity to launch their platform. Desktop.com also wanted a better log-in process as well as multi-factor authentication (MFA).

Larsen explains the decision had to be made early in development. “In this crucial part of our journey towards launch, should we spend hundreds of hours creating our own in-house solution, or should we utilize a well-known solution that already exists?”

With support from a development partner, Desktop.com was encouraged to evaluate Auth0. “Choosing Auth0 was a pretty easy choice,” says Larsen. “Instead of pouring our resources into maintenance and reinventing the wheel, we could focus on innovation and product development.”

Modern Identity Provides Convenience and Security

To ensure a smooth implementation, Desktop.com worked closely with Auth0 support. A three-day workshop was set up to understand the scope of the project and begin work. According to Larsen, “the workshop was very beneficial for our discovery process and saved us a lot of time and resources in our initial setup process.”

Today, users can access Desktop.com’s platform via username and password or social login providers including Google, Apple, and Microsoft. They have also set up Single Sign On (SSO) across their suite of offerings, further simplifying the user experience, and enabled MFA to secure logins.

“Working with Auth0 has been so beneficial to us as a startup,” says Larsen. “It has allowed us to simplify our authentication flows and deliver the high level of security and compliance that we owe to our users.”

Successful Launch Accelerates Remote-Ready Future

With the growth of apps and remote work in the post-COVID world, remote collaboration tools have room to expand. Following Desktop.com’s launch, businesses are looking to the company for scalable management of their digital workplaces, and having identity solved allows Desktop.com to focus on their core product.

“Auth0 has allowed our developers to spend all of their time and energy on the rich feature set that the Desktop.com service has today,” says Larsen. “Without offloading identity and authentication, that surely would not have been possible in the time frame that we had set for ourselves.”

Most importantly, Desktop.com is able to secure its users’ identities as it grows, a critical consideration for enterprise customers.

“We now have a robust solution in place for authentication and security thanks to Auth0,” says Larsen. “Knowing that our users trust us with their digital life and that we can honor that trust really means a lot to us.”