Do Identity Right - So Your Digital Business Strategy Succeeds

Digital services inherently mediate relationships between individuals and businesses, making identity a central success factor. The critical inflection point is registration, where an anonymous consumer becomes a known digital customer and a durable business relationship begins. At that moment, organizations must verify identity and complete onboarding without adding friction that causes abandonment. Despite modern standards enabling choice of devices, authenticators, and external Identity Providers (IdPs), customers still face repeated registrations—often dozens per year—driving dissatisfaction and drop-off.

A major cause of inconsistent, cumbersome customer journeys is the absence of standardized, developer-friendly identity solutions. When teams “invent” registration and authentication per application, results are uneven, security and UX trade off under delivery pressure, and silos form across the customer journey. Modern digital architectures reinforce the need to decouple identity from individual applications through microservices, segregation of identities/applications/data, and an Identity API Layer that applications consume instead of rebuilding identity functions.

Identity API Platforms expose identity capabilities through APIs and combine IAM, CIAM, and IDaaS elements to enable agile delivery, reuse, automation, orchestration, and DevOps alignment across cloud, hybrid, or on-prem environments. Core capabilities include identity/user management, authentication, authorization, audit/compliance, workflow/orchestration, API security, DevOps support, and strong developer enablement via documentation and tooling. Identity must be treated as strategic infrastructure: point solutions per app cannot deliver full value unless all digital services share a unified platform.

Auth0 is positioned as a leading Identity API Platform provider, offering extensive REST/JSON APIs, broad federation (OIDC, OAuth, SAML, WS-Fed), strong developer ecosystem, and security features such as anomaly detection and breached-password detection. An action plan emphasizes cross-functional alignment, inventorying current tooling, defining integration/migration strategy, and enforcing a single strategic platform.

• Registration is defined as the inflection point where an anonymous consumer becomes a customer and a digital identity begins.
• Individual customers commonly complete recurring registrations, often dozens within a single year across different services.
• Identity API Platforms expose identity capabilities through APIs used for authentication, registration, and identity-related tasks.
• Identity API Platforms combine IAM, CIAM, and IDaaS capabilities and provide them via APIs.
• Identity API Platforms require support for identity/user management, authentication, authorization, and auditing.
• Auth0 has offices in Bellevue (WA), London, Buenos Aires, Sydney, and Tokyo.
• Auth0 was founded by two Microsoft veterans.
• Auth0’s APIs are primarily REST/JSON, and its Management APIs provide a RESTful interface to almost the entire management framework.
• Auth0 supports OIDC, OAuth, SAML, and WS-Federation for federation connections.
• Auth0 includes anomaly detection, brute force protection, and breached password detection capabilities.

• “Creating digital services is always about managing the digital identities of consumers, customers, and business partners.”
• “Registration is the inflection point from an anonymous consumer to a customer – where the life of a digital identity starts.”
• “The belief of many businesses that they must control the entire customer journey is a fiction in today’s connected, digital ecosystems.”
• “Agile development requires a strong application architecture and an established framework of well-thought-out core services – with identity solutions at the center.”
• “A critical characteristic of Identity API Platforms is their focus on being developer-friendly.”
• “By default, Auth0 stores the users' credentials in a database, although customers can use their own user repository.”
• “One of Auth0’s greatest strengths is its developer tools, online support, and overall ecosystem.”
• “Notably, solutions such as Auth0 should be positioned as a strategic platform, not for providing identity services to single apps only.”
• “As always, it is more difficult to consolidate disparate versions – but not doing it will make things even worse over time.”
• “It is easier to start top-down than to consolidate various existing solutions.”