Building the best CIAM platforms

DPG Media has been working hard to build a best-in-class CIAM (Customer Identity Access Management) platform that can be used throughout their services. Due to the nature of supporting a variety of business partners as well as consumers, this identity platform must be secure and trustworthy. But it also needs to be flexible at the same time as all partners have their own requirements to meet. This allows them to roll it out across the entire organisation on both web and mobile, for more than 50 websites and mobile apps. Their goal is agility to move and adapt in the global digital revolution.

OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect are must-haves

When building the CIAM solution, they quickly realized that it would have to be compliant with OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect (OIDC) as they have become the de-facto standards.

Neither IDaaS, IAM software, nor OSS worked

Building the OAuth/OIDC part of their CIAM was a challenge for DPG Media, despite evaluating several options. Implementing their own OAuth/OIDC service was not feasible due to its cost. Neither IDaaS nor IAM software worked because they failed to provide enough agility and bundled unwanted and non-customizable features. There were a lot of open source libraries available, but none of them inspired confidence.

Agility and control matter

Time to market and agility were a great concern for DPG Media since the market they are in is incredibly volatile and in full digital revolution. Thus they wanted a solution that could help them to build their own identity platform quickly, but at the same time, meet their unique requirements.

OAuth/OIDC processing APIs

DPG Media reached out to us, as Authlete provides a very clean service interface and that is exactly what DPG Media needs to solve OAuth/OIDC operations, and also gives full control over their own identity management platform.

“Semi-Hosted” architecture

As there are different types of technical scenarios that DPG Media needs to fulfill in order to support their partners and clients, customizations were one of the key factors. For example, some partners provide video on demand service which requires device authentication flow in order to support their DRM, but others simply require login flows with an email address. Authlete’s unique “Semi-Hosted” architecture enables them to quickly implement the best user experience using an appropriate OAuth/OIDC flow for each different service.

Agility, controllability, and cost-efficiency

Tom Bruggeman, Area Manager at DPG Media, commented saying that “Since we are a media company, we used to be a dying business, and we needed to move incredibly quickly. We needed to be at the forefront of the digital revolution or digitalization of our sector. And this means that we need agility and it can only happen if we have control. Unlike other platforms or services, Authlete gives us full control of what we want to achieve in a short period of time. Time is very important.”

He also added, “We chose Authlete because they are extremely fast to support and adapt to the latest OpenID standards. Another key factor for the selection was cost to build and deploy our identity platform. Authlete was very cost-efficient, compared to the alternatives. Deploying our platform built on Authlete was not hard at all.”

Enabling a very stable and reliable platform

One of the strong benefits that DPG Media found about Authlete is that it provides very stable and reliable performance. Tom commented that “The integration with Authlete’s solution has been rock solid and it helped us to build a very stable solution. It is like a submarine type of service; it's there but we hardly see it from the surface.”

Identity platform as the foundation

During the conclusion session, Tom said that “Identity is crucial for all services. We could imagine software that magically detects who we are and what we want to do, but that is not going to exist for a while. We need to adapt with agile digital identity changes to meet consumers' needs. Now we have our identity platform as the foundation so that we can achieve them.”

To continue supporting and contributing to the DPG Media’s powerful and scalable identity management platform, Authlete continues to commit to deliver world-class functions and services.