AGL Enterprise Security Architect Heng Mok’s made a career out of being at the start of transformation programs. After building his deep knowledge of cybersecurity strategy and architecture in the banking industry, he shifted to energy, joining one of Australia’s leading providers of integrated energy at just the right time.
“The energy market is going from centralized to distributed,” Mok says. “There are number of things that need to change. In a distributed world, you have to have more of a focus on what the customer wants and the platform to orchestrate that new energy concept.”
At the AWS Summit in Sydney this week, Mok will share lessons learned during the first stage of AGL Energy’s digital transformation journey — re-architecting customer identity and authentication for AGL’s applications with the help of Auth0.
Before the change, AGL customers faced poor sign-up and login experiences as well as the need to navigate to disconnected sites. Mok and his team were looking to partner with a third-party provider who could rapidly deliver secure speed-to-value as well as key features. This is why AGL chose Auth0, Mok says. Also critical was the ability to maintain local data sovereignty — easily handled thanks to Auth0’s data center presence through AWS.
AGL’s fast timeline due to the demanding schedule needed to rebuild applications also meant that Mok was looking for a partnership instead of a traditional customer/vendor relationship. “Culturally, Auth0 has been very delightful to worth with,” Mok says. citing strong support teams and architects’ building capability as well as Auth0’s willingness to speed up features on its own roadmap to accommodate AGL’s needs, like an earlier release of custom domains.
Since the first minimum viable product (MVP) went live in March of 2017, Mok and his team have built eight other apps and integrations, providing with seamless and secure authentication as well as innovations like integrating through Auth0 to give AGL customers the ability to manage energy using Alexa’s voice control.
Using a custom-built migration, AGL has been able to successfully consolidate identity to a central location. Mok has seen a dramatic increase in overall speed-to-value, from faster onboarding and an increased ability to rapidly offer customer choices to building new business capabilities. Having created these patterns, he says they are now able to quickly incorporate excellence into the platform with automatic testing that takes only five to 30 minutes during rollout.
“Auth0’s probably our fastest performing component in our digital set. Onboarding customers live onto the platform and handling quick authentication switches has improved the overall customer experience,” Mok says.
During his AWS talk, The Secret to AGL’s Digital Transformation, on April 11th from 4:15 - 4:45 p.m., Mok will share:
- Practical tips for integrating identity, easily and securely
- First-hand anecdotes and lessons learned
- Strategies to integrate an identity platform into an existing in-house infrastructure
“I’m definitely excited to share AGL’s journey and how partnering with Auth0 has been a fundamental business enabler for our organization. I’ll discuss what challenges we’ve been through and some of the wins we’ve had as a result,” says Mok.
To learn more about Interaction-based Authentication Skills for Alexa, check out Auth0 Sales Engineer Steve Adams’ talk from 4:15 - 4:30 p.m on April 12th. Auth0’s expert staff will also be available to discuss your identity needs throughout the conference. You’ll find them at Auth0’s booth at Marketplace M7. Not able to make to Sydney this year but still need help with identity? Reach out to sales@auth0.com.
