Adopting modern identity one app at a time.

February 12, 2024

Most businesses we've worked with have custom developed legacy apps that often underpin critical business processes.

Although legacy web apps present an ongoing risk to many enterprises, there is a misconception that nothing can be done with them.

Often, they are so intertwined with existing business processes, migrating to new platforms isn’t always feasible and they are not often supported by vendors. Customers do not know how to integrate them for Single Sign On.

Learn more about how Identifly helped a key customer modernise core enterprise web apps by integrating with Okta, yielding significant reduction in cyber risk and improving user experience.

The Challenge

Legacy in-house developed apps or apps that are no longer supported remain a major challenge for enterprises when moving to modern cloud identity management platforms.

Many custom web apps are limited to authenticating to traditional on-premise directories, using insecure or deprecated protocols (e.g ADFS, LDAP).

Often these apps store and manage businesses' critical and confidential information, proving that the modernisation of authentication has the potential to yield significant security benefits.

Integration with modern cloud identity also increases a return on investment of these platforms and improves user experience by minimising logins.

A client recently approached the Identifly team to review twelve legacy custom applications, all of which were critical to the organisation, and with thousands of users.

The Solution

Identifly performed a code review on each application to determine the effort required and worked with the customer to develop an implementation plan.

Our full stack dev team began to unravel the code to isolate the functions that were performing authentication and authorisation.

We expanded on our prebuilt authentication components from various platform libraries to add to the application (including Java, Rails, PhP).

Following integration testing, we worked with the customer to deploy to UAT to perform end to end customer testing.

After successful testing, we worked with the customer to deploy the apps to production, assisting in the technical change process.

The Impact

All twelve of the customer’s legacy web apps are now integrated with Okta, leading to a significant improvement, not only for the customers’ security posture, but also enhancing the user experience.

The client’s security team now have the ability to enforce consistent controls including multi-factor authentication, improving their compliance position and squeezing more value from their existing Okta investment.