Evercast outsources Customer Identity to focus on scalable product development

Implementing a scalable, compliant Identity infrastructure

With 4K streaming and video chat in one place, Evercast empowers global creative teams to collaborate in real time on a secure platform. The company works with the media and entertainment industry’s largest, most security-conscious studios and production companies, thus helping protect its customers’ proprietary footage is its top priority. Recognizing that security begins with Identity, Evercast initially developed a simple, custom Identity and Access Management (IAM) solution to get its customers started. As Evercast grew, the homegrown solution was pushed to its limits.

When Evercast found a bug to patch or a change to make to its IAM solution, it was complicated to navigate through years of accumulated technical debt. Its business customers were becoming more sophisticated and requested an option to use Single Sign-On (SSO), but each enterprise customer that needed SSO had their own technical requirements, and the team had to build a new connection from scratch each time. These implementations required several engineers and took weeks to develop, in addition to needing ongoing maintenance. With this custom code, navigating 15 to 20 Trusted Partner Network (TPN) audits for the Motion Picture Association (MPA) was also time consuming and cumbersome. To simplify all of this, Evercast started a search for an Identity partner that wouldn’t disrupt its existing customers or put its engineering teams’ existing work at risk.

Updating Identity features without disrupting the customer experience

The Evercast team wanted to migrate its Identity solution quickly, and they knew it had to easily support multiple platforms and devices, should be fast and easy to implement, and they would only have one shot at making the change. In the entertainment industry, if something doesn’t work, a customer will move onto something that does. The first solution Evercast considered checked its boxes, but it would have dramatically impacted its customer experience — something the company could not risk. During this evaluation process, several Evercast customers asked the team if they offered support for Okta.

With its customers driving the change, Evercast found that Okta Customer Identity Cloud (CIC), powered by Auth0, satisfied its strategic needs, would not disrupt its customers, would be highly customizable, and would provide the company with a team of Identity experts to collaborate with. Evercast’s engineers were able to implement Okta CIC (and SSO) without its customers noticing a change. On the backend, Evercast has retained much of its own custom code and was able to simply connect Okta directly to the parts of its own Identity infrastructure it wanted to keep by referring to Okta’s robust API documentation. 

Simplifying Identity management to accelerate product development

Evercast opted to maintain some of its own Identity infrastructure rather than implementing CIC’s Software Development Kit (SDK) because of complex, customer-specific connections it wanted to retain during implementation. With this change, implementing Single Sign-On for enterprise customers now takes hours rather than weeks of engineering effort. This time savings allows the team to redirect resources spent on coding from scratch toward developing impactful features for the Evercast platform. It also gives the company more flexibility to offer Identity management features to its customers. When an enterprise client threatened to churn if Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) wasn’t enabled for its thousands of users in just a few months, Evercast delivered efficiently, ultimately strengthening the partnership, by leveraging Okta API documentation for rapid development.

The Evercast team continues to explore adding new Identity features — including Adaptive MFA and Fine-Grained Authorization — to better support its existing and future customers’ security. With Identity data centralized in Okta, Evercast has greater insight into login behaviors and can make informed decisions about what changes or enhancements need to be made to the platform. It can also more easily navigate MPA audits since all of its Identity-related security controls are in a consolidated, easy-to-read control center. Over time, Evercasty plans to migrate its remaining custom code work over to Okta to have a universal source of truth for every facet of its Customer Identity. 

About Evercast

Evercast is a secure, SaaS-based solution for collaborating live on content creation. With 4K streaming and video chat in one place, Evercast empowers global teams to create together in real time.