Why Identity is an Easy Win for Digital Transformation

You can’t buy digital transformation off the shelf.

Digital transformations are driven by a fundamental rethinking of business strategy that creates new business models and innovative services that offer your customers more personalized experience and significant new value.

A few examples of innovative digital transformation:

• Provide expertise: A medical insurance company provides a smartphone app that helps people evaluate illnesses and obtain advice on whether they need to visit a doctor. The ability to get immediate advice provides assurance to customers without adding the cost of non-essential visits to doctors offices and emergency rooms.

• Utilize simulations: Manufacturers of expensive equipment that is costly to reconfigure such as wind turbines in a wind farm add sensors that feed into simulation apps. Simulation enables customers to experiment faster and with less cost to identify the best configuration to use with a product. This helps customers maximize the benefits they get from products faster, which increases customer satisfaction.

• Change revenue model: Vendors of physical products convert a product into a subscription service to create an ongoing revenue stream, with apps to manage the new service. For example, instead of selling lightbulbs, providing lighting as a service so building owners no longer worry about buying and replacing lightbulbs. This provides a helpful service to customers and an ongoing, service-based revenue stream to the lightbulb vendor.

• Monitor systems: Manufacturers can add monitoring capability into products to enable remote monitoring via apps to give customers status and early warning of likely failures in equipment or services they’ve purchased. This applies to everything from medical devices to heavy construction equipment to locomotives. Access to granular sensor data helps prevent downtime in critical equipment and increases customer visibility and satisfaction.

• Multi and Omnichannel: Almost any business can use digital transformation to integrate customer experience across multiple sales channels and platforms to deliver better customer experience. Orders placed on a website can send alerts with shipping updates or in-store pickup data to a customer’s phone. A customer in a retail store can take a picture of a product in an app that pulls up all the relevant product information from the website. This provides better information to a customer and enables staff to spend time helping customers in other ways.

Digital transformation drives how an organization combines technology, people, and processes to deliver new or creatively updated services that help customers solve problems, gain new insights and save time.

For innovation to provide a competitive advantage, it has to be unique to your business, which often requires some custom applications. The applications created as part of digital transformation require several different Identity Management features.

Critical Identity Features for Digital Transformation Apps

Auth0 has worked with customers in many industries on creating the identity management foundation for their digital transformations. We’ve identified five common identity requirements for successful digital transformation projects.

Feature #1: Readying Authentication

Almost every digital transformation project involves applications that need to authenticate users, but most teams can’t afford the time to research obscure authentication protocols and it’s highly likely that the project could require consolidating or connecting to legacy systems. Ultimately, teams need a secure authentication platform that’s easy to integrate with applications and that solves the problem of legacy user stores, so the team can focus on delivering innovation and business value.

If a project involves sensitive data, you’ll want to offer your customers the added protection of multi-factor authentication that’s convenient to use.

Feature #2: Extensible User Profiles for Customized User Experience

Delivering a personalized experience to users requires that applications have access to user profile data. This requires the ability to consolidate or integrate disparate sources of user profile data if they are spread across legacy repositories. It also frequently calls for the ability to customize the user profile information available to your applications.

Feature #3: Swiss Army Knife of Identity — Authentication Hub

Many digital transformation projects involve collaboration and the need to authenticate users from partners, business customers, and consumers. Some organizations will demand that you support their chosen identity service (bring-your-own-identity) so they retain centralized control over their users’ accounts. This requires supporting many different authentication protocols such as SAML, OIDC, and myriad custom implementations by different social providers.

Feature #4: Omnichannel — Be Mobile Ready

As digital transformation initiatives progress, they need to integrate services across different device channels, known as providing multi-channel and omnichannel service. This demands a similar authentication experience across different device types for an integrated customer experience.

Feature #5: Authorization

Digital transformation projects require the agility of application architectures based on APIs which can be evolved rapidly. Security demands proper authorization to access those APIs for both applications and users. This requires an extensible authorization platform to govern access for users, applications, and APIs.

"Find out what are the critical identity features often required for #digitaltransformation wins."

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Auth0 Has You Covered

Auth0’s authentication and authorization platform can be easily integrated into your applications and provides each of the critical features described above, so your project is successful.

Authentication

Auth0 provides an authentication service, complete with user login and signup features, that can be customized and branded, as needed, with minimal effort. Auth0 can support authentication against legacy databases or help you migrate users out of legacy repositories if needed. With Auth0 you can also turn on multi-factor authentication with a toggle, immediately offering stronger authentication to protect your customers’ data.

Auth0's Lightweight Universal Login

User Profiles

Auth0 provides options for migrating and consolidating user profiles from legacy databases, and the ability to deliver customized user profile data to applications. Auth0 features can optionally be used to migrate users from legacy data stores into one consolidated repository. You can also customize the user profile data within Auth0 and deliver selected custom attributes to applications in signed security tokens. This enables your applications to deliver a more customized experience for each user.

Customized User Profile

{
  "emails": "jane.doe@example.com",
  "user_metadata": {
    "hobby": "surfing",
    "room_preferences": ["king", "finance_news", "quiet"],
    "preferred_language": ["french"]
  },
  "app_metadata": {
    "plan": "full",
    "hotel_addons": ["tour", "laundry", "biz-center", "spa"],
    "last_visit": "2019_05_09"
  }
}

User Profiles

You can use the Auth0 Dashboard to manage your users.

Authentication Hub

Auth0 supports connections to a wide array of identity providers so your application doesn’t have to directly support different protocols and the implementation specifics of each one. This allows you to easily say, "yes!" to customers and partners who demand a bring-your-own-identity model.

Auth0 Social Identity Providers

Auth0 Enterprise Identity Providers

Cross-Platform Support

Auth0 provides SDKs for popular languages and platforms, enabling you to deliver a unified authentication experience across both desktop and mobile platforms to support your multi-channel and omnichannel initiatives.

Auth0 SDKs

Authentication Platform

Authorization

Auth0’s authorization features make it convenient for you to protect the data you manage by controlling exactly what each application and user can do. We provide a convenient configuration interface and deliver carefully scoped security tokens to your applications.

Authorization

API Authorization

https://YOUR_DOMAIN/authorize?
    response_type=code&
    client_id=YOUR_CLIENT_ID&
    redirect_uri=https://YOUR_APP/callback&
    scope=SCOPE&
    audience=API_AUDIENCE&
    state=STATE

Example of making a request to the authorization URL to get an authorization code.

"You can't afford to be slowed down by identity management challenges while your team learns obscure authentication protocols. Speed up your #digitaltransformation with Auth0."

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Hitting Delivery Dates with Identity

You can’t buy digital transformation off the shelf, but you can buy an identity platform that starts delivering value out-of-the-box. With Auth0, you can easily consolidate legacy repositories of customers without password reset with trickle migration, implement Single Sign On (SSO) for customer convenience, and take advantage of the latest standards and best practices for authentication and authorization, like OIDC and OAuth 2.0.

Competitive pressures and emerging privacy regulations demand that you innovate or renovate applications and deliver digital transformation at pace. You can’t afford to be slowed down by identity management challenges while your team struggles with complex authentication protocols. Your project team can focus on innovation and hitting delivery dates if you have an identity management solution that is fast to adopt — and easily extended as your project evolves.

In this post we’ve focused on the 5 common identity needs experienced across many different digital transformation projects, and how Auth0 supports those requirements.

If you’d like to learn more about how Auth0 can help you score an early digital transformation win with identity, please reach out to an Auth0 resource.