“Nordcloud was founded because there weren’t any companies capable of helping enterprises adopt the public cloud in 2011,” Jakub Woźniak, Principal Architect, explains. Since then, the company has grown from a consulting firm into a full-fledged managed service provider that was purchased by IBM in December 2020.

Now, the company is helping enterprises manage their cloud footprint in a new way — by packaging the tools and applications they’d built internally to help their clients manage cloud performance across three major platforms (Azure, Google, and AWS) into a single SaaS product they call Klarity.

However, enterprises have strict security and user experience requirements for any software they adopt, which meant Nordcloud had a demanding list of authentication requirements to satisfy.

“Klarity has five different applications, and enterprise users expected a consistent authentication experience no matter where they joined our system,” Woźniak explains. “We couldn’t cut corners in terms of security either because the data that we’re sharing is very important for enterprise customers.”

Time-to-Market Requirements Lead Nordcloud to External Solutions

The team at Nordcloud knew they could build an identity solution themselves that would provide both the user experience and security enterprise customers required. However, they knew that doing so would require a considerable amount of time, which was something they couldn’t afford.

“We are cloud-native and believe that cloud is the best way to reduce your time to market,” Woźniak says. “So to maintain that time to market for our clients, we needed to keep our focus on the business logic rather than implementing something like authentication that has already been done much better by someone else.”

The team had past experience with external identity solutions that were provided by the cloud vendors they worked with. But they weren’t confident they could trust those solutions in the future, which led them to Auth0. “I was looking at how those services evolved over the years, and they were just add-ons, not the core service of the platform,” Woźniak explains. “We needed an identity provider that was fully committed to delivering a state-of-the-art, federated identity management platform. And we chose Auth0 because of that.”

Nordcloud Integrates 5 Apps With Auth0 in 2 Weeks

Once Nordcloud had access to Auth0’s API (application programming interface), they were able to integrate Auth0’s identity platform into their first application in less than one week. The other four applications took just one more week to integrate — over 60% faster in total than other identity providers they’d used in the past.

“We built a baseline by migrating our first application, Image Factory. Then, with the baseline in place, it took us about two days per application to switch the rest of them,” Woźniak says. “With our previous identity solution, it took us over a week per application to get everything in place and get the configuration straight.”

With Auth0 in place, Nordcloud customers can log in using their username and password or enterprise federation via Microsoft Active Directory. To add an additional layer of security expected of enterprise users, Nordcloud has enabled multi-factor authentication (MFA) by default. And thanks to Auth0’s Management API, implementing role-based access controls (RBAC) for new enterprise clients was four times faster than if the Nordcloud team had had to build those controls themselves.

“With something like identity management, the most time-intensive part is usually at the beginning of a new project, because you need to build something so users are able to log in,” Woźniak explains. “Without Auth0, this would take four times longer to implement.”

Nordcloud Sees 300% ROI With Auth0’s Platform

Just months after integrating with Auth0, Nordcloud is already seeing nearly 300% ROI on the money they’re spending to offload identity. “We’re saving at least two, if not three, times the price we’re paying for Auth0 in development time for integrations and troubleshooting,” Darek Dwornikowski, Global Head of Engineering, says.

Offloading identity to Auth0 has also allowed developers at Nordcloud to focus on improving Klarity as a product rather than managing authentication and access protocols. “For example, we’ve been able to focus more time working on our cost optimization engine because we have more development time to spare,” Dwornikowski says.

Most importantly, however, offloading identity to Auth0 has allowed the team at Nordcloud to rest easy knowing their customers’ data is secure both now and in the future. “The quality of my sleep has improved significantly,” Woźniak says. “I feel very confident knowing that Auth0 cares for its platform.”