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How Holland and Barrett accelerated its digital transformation with Auth0

Delivering secure identity and eliminating technical debt

About

Holland and Barrett is Europe’s leading nutritional supplement retailer. Founded in 1870 from a sleepy English village, the company now operates over 1,300 locations across 16 global markets and boasts annual revenues exceeding £726.7m ($821.21). 

Like many physical retailers, the Coronavirus pandemic forced Holland and Barrett to accelerate its digital transformation plans. Although the company was an early Internet pioneer, establishing its e-commerce platform in 2008, its existing online presence proved difficult to scale. 

In 2020, Holland and Barrett chose to rebuild its web platform from the ground-up, with a modern microservices-centric design. With security and developer agility as a leading priority, the company selected Auth0 as its identity provider.

Industry

Retail

Region

EMEA

Rearchitecting Holland and Barrett

Like many old-school retailers out there, Holland and Barrett started their online journey by relying on out-of-the-box solutions.,” explained Paris Apostolopoulos, Engineering Manager at Holland and Barrett.

Although the previous stack served the company well as it grew its online presence, the growing shift from physical retail to e-commerce emphasized the need for the company to take full ownership of its technological architecture. 

We previously relied on huge, commercial systems that owned both the functionality and customer data. As we sought to better understand our customers and improve their shopping experience, we realized we had to move away from that. We needed a modern system that is easier to secure, more flexible, and is easier for customers to use,” Apostolopoulos said. 

Rebuilding an e-commerce giant from the ground-up is no small task. It required Apostolopoulos and his team to make decisions with profound consequences for the future growth and evolution of the platform. 

Our original identity system was a simple Java-based web service that tied together the various Oracle products we used,” he said. 

We thought about re-implementing that functionality using a modern tech stack, but ultimately decided against it. We’re in the business of retail. We don’t want to re-invent the wheel. We want something that would ultimately put us in a more secure position, while proving easier to develop and maintain.

We previously relied on huge, commercial systems that owned both the functionality and customer data. As we sought to better understand our customers and improve their shopping experience, we realized we had to move away from that. We needed a modern system that is easier to secure, more flexible, and is easier for customers to use

Paris ApostolopoulosEngineering Manager

The Auth0 Factor

Security was Holland and Barrett’s first priority. Data migration and long-term maintenance followed. 

We want our users to securely access our website. But, at the same time, we’re currently dealing with 15 years of legacy systems. We needed something that was flexible and would allow us to easily make changes in the years to come,” said Apostolopoulos. 

We saw so many companies doing amazing things with Auth0. But we also saw that migrations were easy and robust. We could transition from our existing platform to Auth0 without our customers noticing anything. That was important because, from a business side, we don’t want to lose customer data or accounts. The only thing they should see is a nice UI, and that’s it,” he added. 

In three months, Apostolopoulos and his team had built a new authentication layer based on Auth0. Development represented a fraction of this time. 

In the case of our web applications, we integrated Auth0 in one day. Our mobile apps took a little bit longer. The biggest challenge was moving our customer data from the existing proprietary tools to our new infrastructure,” he said. 

Our contract included a number of support hours with Auth0 architects. We found the tooling and documentation really mature, and the only time we asked for help was when dealing with specific migration challenges. The quality of support was incredible. We had specific questions and received definitive answers.” 

We saw so many companies doing amazing things with Auth0. But we also saw that migrations were easy and robust. We could transition from our existing platform to Auth0 without our customers noticing anything. That was important because, from a business side, we don’t want to lose customer data or accounts. The only thing they should see is a nice UI, and that’s it.

Paris ApostolopoulosEngineering Manager

Holland and Barrett’s Identity Journey

Starting from scratch is a daunting task. Especially when you’re one of the world’s leading wellness brands. Although Holland and Barrett are yet to deploy Auth0’s more advanced identity features, like Social Login, it feels confident that its chosen solution will give it the flexibility to make more ambitious improvements in the future. 

“There’s still a lot of work to do, but we’re thrilled we don’t have to deal with authentication anymore. Auth0 has saved our developers a lot of work,” said P. Apostolopoulos.

There’s still a lot of work to do, but we’re thrilled we don’t have to deal with authentication anymore. Auth0 has saved our developers a lot of work

Paris ApostolopoulosEngineering Manager

About Auth0

Auth0, a product unit within Okta, takes a modern approach to identity and enables organizations to provide secure access to any application, for any user. The Auth0 Identity Platform is highly customizable, and is as simple as development teams want, and as flexible as they need. Safeguarding billions of login transactions each month, Auth0 delivers convenience, privacy, and security so customers can focus on innovation. For more information, visit https://auth0.com.

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