Identity Across Business Units

Fueling innovation requires giving business units the support to solve their own challenges. But at large-scale enterprises, that often means dealing with the same problems again and again. Wasting time repeatedly solving identity — including Single Sign On (SSO) and federation and SAML integration — from scratch is expensive, costing you innovation time while adding to the company’s bottom line.

Many companies compromise by investing in an out-of-the-box (OOTB) solution that fits most of the problems, sacrificing flexibility for key customizations teams need now — and in the future. These limited solutions not only disappoint, but also create the need for workarounds that steal development time from the core business.

Centralizing identity, while allowing each department to customize their look and feel, and experience can eliminate these challenges. At Auth0, we have several customers successfully using this type of architecture across business units.

Case Study: Global Industrial Company (>350,000 employees)

One of the world’s largest industrial companies chose Auth0 for a hybrid B2B2C scenario. Operated by the company’s central IT department as a SaaS service, Auth0 allowed out-of-the-box multi-tenant capabilities via OIDC that could be customized as needed for partners and customers accessing the company’s applications accessible via the internet.

Centralized administration maintains tight administrative control, while allowing different business units and partners to configure their own apps and assets, such as custom domains, for their unique audiences. In this case, IT admins mandated an extra layer of protection through multi-factor authentication (MFA), and very quickly “spin-up” sub-tenants for new business units and partners. The result has been organizational consistency across a widely diverse company, with faster time-to-market.

For another success story of complexity, scale, and time-to-market, take a look at how our customer, Cimpress, integrated identity across multiple business units.

Case Study: Cimpress Integrates New Unit in Five Minutes

Auth0 customer Cimpress having grown to more than 40 e-commerce sites in the last five years, considers business unit autonomy a sign of strength — except when it comes to technology. Still, they offer a choice rather than forcing all units to come over to Auth0. Being able to integrate a company like BuildASign in five minutes, though, often makes the case for them. Today, Cimpress manages seamless authentication for 1,500 applications across 500 microservices APIs and 100 UIs with the help of Auth0.

“Auth0 enables us to focus developer time on actual innovative work in the mass customization space. Every second that a developer doesn’t have to worry about how their callers are going to authenticate brings value to the organization,” says Ryan Breen, Director, API Management, Cimpress.

Deal with Complexity across Business Units with Auth0

Your customers don’t care how they log in. They just want to get to your app, but they do want to know they’re giving their credentials to the right place. Future-focused features like Auth0’s Single Sign On allow your customers to comfortably login across multiple brands and tailor their experience at the user- and unit-engagement level. Because Auth0 can handle any language or any stack, you can modernize identity for any business unit (even if they’re still dealing with legacy code).

Centralizing identity allows you to control key aspects of identity, like multi-factor authentication, while allowing your business units to retain their own look and feel. If you’d like to learn how Auth0 can benefit your devs, business units, and your end users while solving your most complex use cases, reach out to sales@auth0.com.