ROLLER is a ticketing-based guest experience platform founded in Australia. They work with thousands of users in over 20 countries, and power a wide range of leisure and entertainment venues, including trampoline parks, water parks, family entertainment centers and indoor skydiving arenas. They’ve found success by specializing in fine-grained ticket solutions, says Andrew Brodie, CTO. “Our platform allows our clients to create session-based tickets based on duration and location capacity within their venues.”

After achieving initial success in Australia and New Zealand, ROLLER set their sights on expanding into the North American market. As they expanded their services internationally, they had to completely overhaul their security and identity structure into one that could grow with them.

Growing Success Leads to an Infrastructure Crossroads

As part of ROLLER’s scaling and security effort, they brought on Sean Fernandez as CIO in mid-2018. “I took on a lot of the responsibilities for security, infrastructure, and just rebuilding some of the components that were probably built in a rapid environment,” says Fernandez. “Really picking apart certain components and then focusing on making it scale and reducing the burden on engineers and the operational staff.”

Identity management was a critical part of our strategy to  protect both our clients and their customers. “Security is always of utmost concern to us as engineers, but also for ensuring that our clients are using best-of-breed security practices,” says Brodie.

Previously, ROLLER had been using an open-source identity solution. As operations became more complex, the free software could no longer handle their growing security needs. Brodie knew they had a decision to make: “If we continued using our existing solution and maintaining it, we would have to rip it out and try to spin up our own infrastructure. The cost and implementation of that was definitely a concern." Instead, ROLLER decided to see what else was out there.

Easier, More Secure Growth With Auth0

ROLLER chose Auth0 to manage their identity infrastructure instead of trying to revamp their current system themselves.“A key reason we decided to go with Auth0 is that it's ultimately going to save us time and money,” says Brodie. “It allows us to focus on our core features and give us and our clients peace of mind that we're using the best of breed, and it's being managed by highly skilled Auth0 engineers.”

As they grew, ROLLER became a more attractive target for malicious actors, and authentication was one of the most vulnerable processes. Auth0 helps protect them, their clients, and their clients’ customers. “We wanted to be confident in our platform across all aspects including security without investing in a large security team or retraining the resources we have. It made good sense to go with experts in the area,” says Fernandez.

ROLLER really values Auth0’s customizability, their ability to stay on top of security trends and threats, and their easy-to-use APIs. “A key thing we really liked about Auth0 is our ability to customize the user interface,” says Brodie. “That was really critical for us.”

An External Security Team at a Fraction of the Cost

ROLLER continues to expand internationally and diversify their offerings. “We're continuing to add more and more applications that will give our clients, and their customers, the best experience possible,” says Brodie. “We've got a foothold in North America, so we're going to continue to push aggressively into the North American market.”

Brodie believes that outsourcing their identity needs to Auth0 allows them to stay focused on their core mission of providing customized POS solutions for their clients: “When you can offload to a well-constructed solution or service that you can trust, it just makes sense to do that, so we can then focus on providing the best solutions to our users, which is the custom work.”

This not only saves them time but also a great deal of money. Fernandez ties the savings to the amount it would cost to run their own in-house security detail: “Three engineers working full-time as security experts. From the building, to maintenance, implementation, to constant investment in keeping things up to date… including auditing the open-source software and solutions we were previously using and doing continuous pen testing and external pen testing and audits for compliance... creating an authentication solution in-house was going to be at least 10 times the cost of just using Auth0.” As ROLLER rolls into the future, Auth0 will continue to support their growing international infrastructure. “Auth0 is a key cornerstone piece of our global platform,” says Brodie.