Customer story: CloudBolt

The situation

CloudBolt Software is growing rapidly. To make sure customers capture the value from all the new features the company rolls out, the team at CloudBolt wanted to introduce a new online learning portal. The new portal would give its customers and partners access to self-paced training and other resources to help them maximize the CloudBolt solutions they’ve invested in.

The introduction of the new learning portal would have meant that customers and partners would have had to remember yet another set of login credentials. In addition, CloudBolt already used multiple tools such as ZenDesk for support and AllBound to power its partner portal – each requiring unique usernames and passwords – to serve their customers and partners.

“We want our customers to be engaged with us and our product… not fiddling around trying to remember their passwords. That’s when we knew we needed a single secure sign-in solution for all our customer-facing platforms so our customers and partners get a consistent, seamless and secure experience with CloudBolt no matter which system or what device they’re using,” said Nick Mansour, Chief Revenue Officer at CloudBolt.

Evaluating options

Nick and team were on a tight timeframe.

“The customer portal was set to launch within a couple of months, so we needed to find a provider who could integrate with our current technology, buildout multiple customer and partner journeys and test and deploy the solution in a matter of weeks,” Nick recalled.

“I’ve deployed new identity management solutions at previous companies, and most vendors would’ve required our engineering team to spend weeks creating custom code to support a new solution,” Nick said. “That was an on-starter for us.” For this reason, the CloudBolt team evaluated only two identity management providers, one of those being Strivacity.

During an early meeting with Strivacity, Nick was immediately impressed with the level of care Strivacity put into the customer experience beyond providing secure login services, and how easy it was to get started using the tool without having an army of developers sitting alongside him.

“With Strivacity, I had the luxury of first designing the ideal journeys we wanted our customers and partners to have within our different platforms, and then creating the workflows and layering in technology to support those. Most vendors take the opposite approach, retrofitting customer experiences to their technology capabilities.”

“Strivacity was a breath of fresh air.”

The Strivacity team created a proof of concept for CloudBolt, and Nick added multi-factor authentication (MFA) and identity affirmation attributes in minutes with just a few clicks. “Turning on MFA was literally as simple as clicking a radio button,” he said.

Nick and team selected Strivacity as their Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) provider just a month and a half before the launch of customer training portal. The two teams hit the ground running in preparation for the deployment.

Preparing for launch

The two teams had already configured 90 percent of what CloudBolt wanted and needed to support their customers thanks to the work that went into the proof of concept.

The next step for the teams was to implement and test a handful of additional workflows beyond those that were created during the POC. During this process, CloudBolt integrated its Microsoft Azure AD and Salesforce instances with Strivacity, and used SAML Federation to integrate with ZenDesk and AllBound. On top of that, CloudBolt’s marketers redesigned the look and feel of their login page using Strivacity’s CSS editor.

Outside of engineering, CloudBolt’s marketing, the sales and customer support teams worked together to create messaging and communications around the launch to ensure that their customers and partners knew what resources they had access to and how to log into all of them. The teams also hosted internal training sessions designed to educate customer and partner-facing employees on the launch.

Benefits of partnering with Strivacity

Using Strivacity’s customer identity and access management (CIAM) platform to centralize all CloudBolt logins not only provided a secure, friction-free experience for the brand’s customers and partners, but also offered plenty of benefits for its engineering, marketing and security teams.

• Minimal time required from engineering teams:
  The CloudBolt engineering team’s first priority is supporting and enhancing the brand’s products. “Our engineering team already wears multiple hats every day and they simply don’t have the bandwidth to dedicate hours to maintaining an identity management system,” said Nick. “That’s one of the many things we love about working with Strivacity – no one on our team is solely dedicated to managing the product, and it requires minimal time from our developers to keep it running the way we want.”
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• Customized branding options for multiple audiences:
  With three distinct customer service platforms, CloudBolt customized its sign-on experiences for all of the musing Strivacity.
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• Greater automation capabilities that save time and development cycles:
  By centralizing its secure sign-in capabilities with Strivacity, the CloudBolt team gained the ability to easily automate various steps in their customer and partner journeys across all three of their platforms.
  Nick shared an example: “Before we had Strivacity, anyone could sign up for our customer support portal and then a human would have to approve their request. Today, we created an automated process that happens during sign-in that checks to see whether an individual meets certain criteria. In our case, when a new user attempts to register, Strivacity looks up the domain of their email address in Salesforce and maps it against the criteria we’ve laid out. The system then either allows or denies their sign-up request based on what they submitted.”