In the DACH region, trust is everything, and one of the first places you can build consumer trust is your login experience. German consumers say their main frustrations with signing up to a new app or online service are having to fill in long login or sign-up forms (42%) and entering private information (38%), followed by having to create a password that has to meet certain requirements (33%), and a new ID and password for every app or online service (31%). These statistics come from a global research study conducted by Auth0 and YouGov, including more than 2,000 consumers and 200 IT/marketing decision-makers in Germany.
One of the challenges organizations encounter when looking to launch new services or feature sets is the fact that many of these features are cloud-based while existing services that could benefit from integration are often legacy and hosted on-premises. Finding an Identity as a Service (IDaaS) provider who can link those legacy systems and modern cloud-first platforms is an important step towards creating a future-proof service. However, many organizations in the DACH region are still building their own identity solutions. Or they’re misusing tools designed for managing employee identities for customer-facing needs. Both of these scenarios can introduce additional pain points when it comes to joining legacy and modern systems.
Digitization Projects Are Resource Intensive
IT departments have spent the better part of the last 18 months establishing work-from-home protocols, migrating critical systems to the cloud for better access, and ensuring that everyone’s data stays safe and secure throughout the transition. Despite the acceleration in these digitization projects brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, many of these systems have to remain housed on legacy on-prem servers due to a lack of alternatives. Bridging the gap between these and the convenient cloud-based tools your customers need access to is a large undertaking, especially for IT teams that are already stretched thin supporting ongoing internal needs.
Your IT and development teams support the organization’s goals by creating and maintaining the best web applications for your customers and by keeping your infrastructure running smoothly. That way, everyone, both inside and outside of the company, has the best experience possible. Partnering with an IDaaS provider like Auth0 will free those teams to continue focusing on their primary goals by taking the task of user authentication off their hands — and putting it in the hands of identity experts. This ensures your users get the CX they’ve come to expect while you maintain control over your data and privacy.
Legacy Workforce Identity Solutions Are Not Built To Face External Threats
The workforce Identity and Access Management (IAM) tool you’re using today may look like an attractive option for your customer-facing needs. There are several problems with this idea, starting with the simple fact that IAM solutions are not focused on user experience (UX). Their priority is security, keeping your company’s intellectual property safe and secure from bad actors.
The threats facing customer applications can be vastly different in type and scale. Workforce IAM verifies employee identity in order to approve access to just the tools they need to do their job effectively, from primarily company-owned devices. Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) solutions, on the other hand, need to integrate protection against brute force attacks, password spraying attacks, along with other outside attack vectors. And they need to do that while maintaining identity verification across potentially millions of end-user devices and networks. Additional hurdles exist as well; for example, many IAM tools are on-prem only and unable to protect your new cloud-first infrastructure.
Growing Demand From Consumers for a Low-Friction Customer Experience
The acceleration and growth of online tools have increased consumer expectations for a safe and simple identity experience. They’re no longer willing to wait for slow pages to load or to endure lengthy and complex account creation flows. Your customers demand-responsive, intuitive design, or they’ll take their business elsewhere. In fact, 78% of German consumers say they have abandoned an app or online service due to an arduous login experience.
Addressing the systemic issues that need attention to keep up with this demand will put additional stress on your internal teams, pulling their attention away from those core goals we discussed above. You don’t need to sacrifice your user experience in order to create a user-friendly and trusted authentication experience. Auth0 provides a secure platform with a variety of cloud deployment options, including private cloud deployments on Microsoft Azure or AWS infrastructure, and public cloud options using AWS facilities in multiple regions, including Frankfurt. Built by and for development teams, Auth0 is easily customizable to create exactly the low-friction experience your customers demand without sacrificing security and extensibility.
Auth0 Lets You Find the Right Mix of Security, Privacy, and CX
We’ve discussed three pain points organizations in the DACH region are likely to encounter when looking to deploy a new identity and authentication solution across both legacy and cloud-based systems. The Auth0 Identity Platform has a robust feature set designed to address these challenges and any others you may encounter as you embark on your own identity project.
Extensibility allows you to quickly adapt your digitization project
Auth0’s founders wrote the book on identity management at Microsoft while helping development teams remove barriers to building applications in the cloud. The Auth0 Identity Platform is designed with developers in mind, with multiple extensibility points that allow you to configure the exact authentication flows you want.
Exhaustive integrations mean you can bridge the legacy/cloud gap easily and iteratively
No matter what systems you have housed on-prem or on legacy infrastructure and what you have already migrated to the cloud, our Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and Software Development Kit (SDK) libraries mean, you can use one CIAM solution to bridge the gap. That allows you the flexibility to continue your deployment iteratively, knowing that your customer experience won’t suffer any negative impacts as you migrate more services to the cloud on your own schedule.
We’re able to integrate with most existing cloud-based SaaS services via our APIs and SDKs but can also integrate with your on-premise environments as long as they’re accessible via API or otherwise. We are also up to date with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) enacted by the European Union in 2018, so we can help and support our customers in meeting their compliance requirements.
Additionally, Auth0 Marketplace and Actions provide access to a wide array of out-of-the-box integrations with most line-of-business software and services. That means you can quickly connect your CMS and ERP to your new web app, and your users won’t see any change in their experience as it’s serverless, so there won’t be any interruption to your services.
No-, low-, and pro-code options for creating a low-friction user experience
Between the pre-configured integrations in Auth0 Marketplace and our low-code Actions capability, your development team can easily customize Auth0 to meet your customers’ expectations for a secure and low-friction authentication experience. For even more control, we still offer pro-code customization, as always, via our JavaScript editor.
The ability to have all your identity needs up and running quickly means your team can focus on serving their primary functions. Your developers can continue delivering top-quality experiences for your customers, and IT support can maintain your internal employees’ work environment, no matter where they’re working from.
Partnering With Auth0 Ensures a Secure, Customizable CIAM Experience
You can rely on the identity professionals at Auth0 to help:
- focus your development team on innovation
- deliver the identity experience consumers have come to expect
- protect customer data with a deployment option that works for your business
That’s how you deliver an excellent user experience without compromising security or privacy along the way. Read more about our compliance and certifications, then reach out to an identity expert to continue the conversation about how partnering with Auth0 can help your organization.
About the author
Vitor de Sousa
Regional Vice President, Enterprise Sales - Germany