KCLive Award: Consumer Authentication

Yeah. And so let's get started. And in this case, we have seen a project or we hearing a project, you'll see it as well. That is very interesting in the sense of it is combining consumer authentication and consumer OT. So the internet of things, and many of you might have already devices at home that are managed via smartphone. So we have more and more smart devices. Some of them are not that smart, but at the end of the day, talking about smart devices at home and we want to control it and we want to control them in a seamless manner.

And seamless starts with authentication, seamless starts with how can we get access? But we also want to have security because specifically when we look at at consumer IOT devices, there's also a risk in that, by the attacks by, by being these devices being abused. And so our perspective is we something which allows a simple access, simple interaction with these devices, but also enables delivers the security behind it.

And again, authentication is at the front door of all of that. And that was what struck us was positively with this project. And this is the reason why we grant the award. And so don't make it too long. The winner is signify So Great. The best consumer application project, the award goes to signify. And please welcome at the end two, who is principle cloud architect at Phillip U signify, very long title and very long company name in that case, Phillip ATM. Hi.

Hi Martin, Phillip and Aten at end. Welcome. Hey Martin, thank you for having me. So could you talk a little bit about what you did with this project and what the key objectives has been?

Yeah, sure. So the project in itself was a migration of our entire user base from our own IM solution to, to a vendor that would take care of the best practices in, in, in identification identification and authentication. Really. So the key objective for us from that perspective was to expand on the few cloud security and the identity management that we had in place and doing that in the most efficient way was sort of the key objective of that project.

And then after we found a partner to achieve those main goals that we had on the requirements for compliance and hosting, the most important goal for us became to do a zero downtime migration downtime migration for the user base. So we had a two step approach. One was a lazy migration and the other was the bucket of people who wouldn't log in that wouldn't migrate themselves. They would step, we would just step in and migrate the rest of those sides, those people, I think that was the main objective really.

And completing that, you know, freed up a lot of our engineering effort that we could bring back to focus on innovation. So, so, so what you're saying is, in fact, one reason was not spending your own resources on authentication, which you can get us to service, but spending your development resources on sort of the business side of, of your use cases and improving that It's, it's on the business side of things and on the product side of things.

So as you mentioned, our consumers have our devices in their home, and that is where we can contribute the most as why we have the most experience and capacity to bring about actual change for consumers. Right? So rather than having to focus a lot of resources on identity, a problem that is solved, but needs continuous iteration as that domain evolves over time, it would be best to partner when that is not in the direct strategic interest of our R and D department. Yes. Okay.

Before we go a little bit more into the details of the technology, maybe you could talk a little bit about the, the lightning products about what really is controlled so that people who are maybe not so familiar with, with the product portfolio and the, the digital services you deliver to, they get a better impression of what they can do with that solution. Absolutely.

So, so Phillips U is a connected consumer lighting product, which means that we allow consumers to think about lighting in a room and lighting in your home rather than a light bulb in a room. And that means that we focus on setting an experiential property of lighting within a room rather than turning above off on. And there's a lot of integrations that work with that through the way that we set it up.

There are voice integrations with Google voice assistant or Amazon Alexa, and the way that we really approach lighting within the, the rooms that the consumer defines is just a completely different way of looking at lighting that software built on top of such connected lighting systems is allowing for right now. So it is not that I go to the switch and turn on my light bulb, but I have something which is more ambient, which is a total different experience.

I believe I have a TV from your company, which then changes the, the lights to the, sort of the background of the TV, depending on what is on the screen. Correct.

So, so Phillips is known Phillips TVs are known for their Amite, which, which takes pixel segments of the screen and projects that in the background to get a more immersive experience in entertainment. But the beauty of it is that right now we have built products as well, that capture any HDM I signal going into any type, any TV, and that we project that in the entire room around you, on the bulbs you already have. So coming back to my point that once you have such a lighting system, software applications can build additional features on top of that. That's exactly what's happening right now.

So if you already have our system in place and we come up with this H D I analysis device, then at some point you're, you're gonna be able to leverage what's already in a home to use, to use that, to build new use cases for entertainment. Yeah. Okay. Got it. So back to the identity management, consumer identity part, which technologies did you finally use?

So the, the core of this project revolves around how we set up and manage the hue cloud, which is the component that has to tie this all together. And the hue cloud runs on Google cloud platform. The technologies used our Kubernetes, red is type script is, is really the best practice for microservice management and the front end development. And in that interplay of services and technologies, we enable customers to connect to their hu lighting system when they're out of home.

So we have an application that people can make applications with our system that connects through that cloud to their, to their home lighting system. And the other part is that it allows connected third parties to, to use API management and control the lighting system for when they don't have a device within the home. And you could think about automated light control through if this and that the I TT T service or voice control through cloud services, such as Amazon Alexa and Google voice assistant, they use the cloud interface to interact with our, with our system. Yeah. Okay.

And for the identity management piece, which vendor did you choose there? So, so the client towards that, towards that, that, that management part that runs in Google cloud as well. So that is a microservice in itself it's called because it protects the citizens of OS guard. And we use it to, to make sure that we have one point of interaction between the IM service and, and it serves the account pages. Yeah. And the IM services provided by A zero is our partners the, the IM service. Yes. Okay. Got it.

So when you look at the, the project, so, so one thing I'd be curious about is how many uses do you have that authenticate against? Oh, there's millions. So Phillip here right now is one of the biggest, biggest IOT systems in the world before the voices systems. I think it was the biggest at that time. So we're talking about a, a huge user base that makes that we have very strict requirements on, on how this needs to be managed. Absolutely. And what, what, what are your main learnings during that project?

So what are the things where you, what you learned from doing so and what might also be recommendations you'd like to give to others? Okay. Yeah.

So main, main learnings. So I think there are two main learnings, really. So getting up and running with the proof of concept very fast is super valuable, right? It makes sure that you have an idea of what gaps you still have in the project that you need to fill in order to, to bring it to a success. And I think the second learning that sort of flows from this one is that getting a hang of engineering support both from your own company and getting that buy-in, but also from the partner's perspective is definitely very important to get confidence on the project real, real quick.

I think that is one of the main things. So that's what we looked for in the scouting. And that is how we set up this project. We made those people available to get in there and build the first thing, get it up and running in two weeks. It's a very important aspect of doing any of these things successfully because you wanna eliminate your unknown unknowns as soon as you can.

And then I think in the field of identity management and the changing compliance for regulations, I think this more of an overall learning, this can take up so much of your time, whereas you should be focusing on the core of what you should wanna deliver to your consumers. So partnering for things that are on your roadmap and are critical at all stages and are evolving, but not strategic for you is it's good to, to look for partnerships and good to get those things in a standardized way within your platform.

So don't reinvent the wheel, Don't reinvent the wheel, especially not when it's spinning going 200 miles an hour and is on fire. Yes, correct. Yes.

So, so a clear call to rely on services and don't do everything yourself, but spend your time with, with really the capabilities you need to, to deliver, to differentiate from others and to deliver a good customer and digital experience. So I think, well understood. And from my perspective, that makes a lot of sense. And I think the other point you touched to some extent around all this API stuff is also look for solutions that integrate well with all the other building blocks you have. Yes. Okay. Is there anything you'd like to add here?

Oh, I, well, I think the thing to recognize here is that right now is just me on the call, but naturally there's a great team within signify and a lot of partners behind this project that made it a success. So I, I think this would be the right place to thank, thank the team from Q 42. Who's our development partner agency in the Netherlands for the amazing work that they did in the project, everyone involved at signify of course, and the guys from a zero who made the, the process and implementation breeze quite straightforward.

And lastly, I think thank you, thank your organization for appreciation of the work. It's always good to hear Welcome. And thank you for taking the time and for making such a proposal for an award. We really appreciate receiving interesting projects. And this is really definitely one. I like a huge amount of users. Interesting use case well implemented. So thank you very much. And back to any.