Business Objectives
Growing from a small start-up and maturing as a platform, PagerDuty found themselves in need of a solid foundation to securely service their growing customer base. It was important to coordinate services in multiple regions (Europe and the US) by centralizing the application repository and identity management.
The existing identity software was no longer fit for purpose, so they decided to look for a new technical solution that would help with identity management and support the application ecosystem. At the top of the requirement list was a standards-based solution providing OpenID Connect and OAuth support as PagerDuty wanted to improve the user experience, including authentication, for their customers.
Other things on the wish list were high performance, flexibility, configurability and a manageable pricing structure.
Solution
Extensive research and market analysis led to Curity. PagerDuty found that the Curity Identity Server was a well-organized solution, supporting a wide range of protocols, and developed by a team that understands the complexity of managing access across multiple digital services.
In one unified product, they found the unique combination of API security, IAM and powerful developer tools that met their technical requirements. The depth of support for industry standards was a huge benefit and allowed PagerDuty to connect enterprise systems and solve the challenges for authentication and authorization.
By creating a shared layer that can coordinate between PagerDuty’s service regions, and utilizing the multi-region features in the Curity Identity Server, PagerDuty has been able to create a common platform for their applications and identities. The infrastructure can even manage login requests that originate in one region and complete in a different one, routing the user authentication, including their tokens, over to their home region “in-flight” and without impacting the user experience.
Deployment
From the start, PagerDuty was looking for something very focused to run inside their own network, take control of the latency problems and make their own decisions on scalability needs. Implementing the Curity Identity Server means that PagerDuty does not need to pay for every new customer request or enterprise connection and allows for costs to be controlled.
Curity helped build in support for Amazon DynamoDB and now we have a next-generation implementation of a data store. It was functionality we really, really needed and it's been made part of the Curity product. That was a beautiful experience.
Results
Curity gave PagerDuty the foundation to build a shared layer for different regions and create a centralized identity system that suited all different components without the need to duplicate their system for each separate case. At the same time, the ability to deploy the Curity Identity Server across different regions helped PagerDuty to enhance high availability of their services and establish equal performance for different regions while keeping user data private.
The high quality service and support provided by Curity virtually eliminates our operational burden for using Curity Identity Server, but it belongs only to us.
PagerDuty thinks of the Curity Identity Server as having the low operational burden of SaaS, but with the control of resiliency and opportunity to run it where you choose. It also empowers PagerDuty to push the envelope with their developer tools as they are happy with how the Curity team receives feature requests and provides the support they need.
With the support provided by Curity, PagerDuty found the opportunity to grow in the right direction.
The Curity team are experts in what they do in a way that we can be experts in what we do - providing a resilient platform for intelligent and automated incident response. So it is a really nice symbiosis.
