400%

increase in monthly active users

80%

reduction in login-related support demand

66%

reduction in authorization complexity

50%

reduction in manual security investigation effort

For over 90 years, Rohde & Schwarz has been a global guardian of security and connectivity. From the scanners that keep travelers safe at airports to the secure communications used by public authorities and military forces, their technology is the invisible backbone of a safer and connected world. 

As providers of the hardware and software that underpins national security and global communications, Rohde & Schwarz handle highly sensitive customer data. When working with their industry and government customers, managing who can access what is critical. “We have to guarantee that one customer never sees the software or technical data developed for another,” says Patrick Bauriedl, director of external customer applications at Rohde & Schwarz. “We own the customer portals where our customers download their software updates and licenses. Knowing exactly who is logging in is the only way to protect that intellectual property.”

However, the company’s previous legacy identity system handled internal employees, external users, and customers all within the same shared identity system. This created unnecessary complexity and led to a complicated security landscape that lacked the centralized control and flexibility needed to support the company’s growing number of digital services. As such, it was an unsustainable model for a modern customer-facing identity architecture. To keep access separate, the company had to manually create and manage over 2,500 different roles — or unique sets of permissions — making the system slow, prone to errors, and difficult for support teams to navigate.

To overcome this complexity, Rohde & Schwarz initiated a move to a new, third-party identity provider. However, this approach did not meet the company’s business and technical requirements and did not deliver the required OpenID Connect (OIDC)-based login experience in time. “We couldn’t get past the first step of letting a user log in,” says Andreas Würstle, cloud architect at Rohde & Schwarz. “We realized we needed a solution that was reliable and worked as intended right from the start.”

To achieve the level of agility and security their customers required, Rohde & Schwarz implemented Auth0 to establish a strategic identity foundation that orchestrates protection across all their tools and applications, ensuring built-in identity security for every interaction.

By leveraging Auth0, Rohde & Schwarz can manage identity security as a single, connected ecosystem rather than application by application. Instead of a rigid system that requires constant manual updates, they built an automated layer that handles complex global regulations while ensuring seamless, tailored, and secure customer experiences. By moving to this modern architecture, the company successfully standardized 97.4% of its customer-facing applications on OIDC.

No longer bogged down by maintenance, Rohde & Schwarz transformed their identity process from a source of frustration into a driver of business efficiency and scale.

Key to this shift was the implementation of Universal Login. Previously, the company relied on a centrally managed, fully custom-built login experience. Maintaining and evolving that setup required significantly more implementation effort, and it was not optimized for mobile use. With Universal Login, the team moved to a standards-based approach that they can centrally configure and customize, while benefiting from a more modern and responsive experience across desktop and mobile devices. 

Where onboarding a new application used to take several days, the team can now complete the process within half a day. This allows them to focus on product delivery, supporting a higher number of monthly active users without increasing operational effort.

With the development burden lifted, the team turned their attention to streamlining access. To support their customers effectively, Rohde & Schwarz employees need access to customer portals to view technical documents or troubleshoot issues. To overcome the hurdle of having separate internal and external systems, the company used Enterprise Connections to create a secure bridge between their internal office login and the customer portal. This allows staff to log into customer-facing apps using their existing office credentials with a single click, ensuring they can help customers without being slowed down by login issues. The team was able to implement this integration in less than half a day.

Rohde & Schwarz also solved their complicated permission structure by moving to a dynamic model based on user data. Instead of an administrator manually assigning a user to one of 2,500 static roles, the system now looks at specific user attributes to decide what they’re allowed to see in real time. 

By moving beyond a purely role-based model and making stronger use of attribute-based access control in addition to role-based access control, Rohde & Schwarz was able to significantly reduce the number of static roles. This cut authorization complexity by well over two-thirds and reduced the administrative overhead associated with maintaining large numbers of manually managed roles. This didn't just save time, it helped close critical security gaps by ensuring that a user’s permissions are updated automatically the moment their status changes.

The true value of the automated defense Auth0 provides became clear when new security requirements emerged, due to global events. Rohde & Schwarz was able to implement additional access restrictions for software downloads within days, rather than the months it would have taken in the legacy environment. Using Auth0’s centralized identity controls, the team could introduce country- and company-specific access restrictions as well as additional verification steps without redesigning the surrounding application landscape. 

To further harden their environment, Rohde & Schwarz implemented Attack Protection, including brute-force protection and suspicious IP throttling. “Attack Protection has significantly reduced our need for custom security logic in approximately 38 linked applications,” says Manish Singh, Product Owner – Identity and Access Management at Rohde & Schwarz. “It has reduced our manual security investigation effort by 50%. It has also saved us around 80% of our development effort because we can enable these features using Terraform.”

Beyond these manual updates, Auth0 provides a constant, automated layer of security that stops threats before the Rohde & Schwarz team needs to intervene. “We are definitely more secure now,” says Würstle. “Auth0 does such a good job that we don’t even see the attacks. It provides automated anomaly detection capabilities that can identify implausible or suspicious login patterns across distant locations and trigger additional protection measures automatically. It works reliably in the background and significantly reduces the need for manual intervention.”

With their security foundation solidified, the team was equally committed to removing friction on the frontend. Progressive Profiling has become an important capability in the company’s new setup. It allows Rohde & Schwarz to keep the registration barrier low at the beginning, while collecting additional information only when users need access to more sensitive applications or business-critical services.

By removing this initial friction and making the system more reliable, Rohde & Schwarz saw a massive jump in engagement. The total number of users increased by 566%, while the number of monthly active users increased from less than 2,000 in the previous setup to around 10,000 with Auth0, representing a 400% increase in the number of customers successfully using their digital services.

Registrations that used to take days are now 50% automated, with a large share of users completing the process within seconds. This has significantly lightened the load on support teams. When normalized against the strong increase in user volume, registration-related support demand decreased by approximately 60% on a per-user basis, while login-related support demand decreased by approximately 80% on the same basis.

Rohde & Schwarz are currently migrating their final remaining legacy SAML-based application as part of the transition toward a fully modern OIDC-based landscape. The team plans to further scale this foundation by leveraging additional Attack Protection features, such as bot detection and breached password protection, to guard against account takeovers and automated attacks on sensitive flows, such as password resets.

Another important part of Rohde & Schwarz’s 2026 identity roadmap is FIDO2, which allows for passwordless login using biometrics, and phishing-resistant authentication, which were among the original strategic reasons for selecting Auth0. By moving toward passwordless biometrics, and using Terraform to maintain continued automation at scale, Rohde & Schwarz can harden their portals against phishing attacks, while improving the overall customer experience. 

Further plans include deeper monitoring and alerting based on Auth0 logs and metrics, including expanded observability through Grafana, as well as further automation through Terraform and continued improvement of lifecycle-related processes.

By continuing to strengthen their identity security posture, Rohde & Schwarz are ensuring that as they lead the way in global technology, their data remains as secure as the products they build.

“By using Auth0 to manage our customer identities, we have become more flexible and much faster,” says Bauriedl. “That allows us to focus on what we do best: ensuring a safer and connected world.”