Noon Continues its Rapid Growth While Enabling Streamlined, Secure Access to Essential Resources With OneLogin

Noon is a joint venture between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and Mohamed Alabbar. The company was founded with the mission of building an ecosystem of homegrown digital companies from the region, for the region to safeguard the future of the Middle East’s digital landscape. Noon seeks to bring exceptional value and service to our region’s consumers and businesses. Noon’s consumer platform has grown to become the region’s leading online shopping destination with operations in presence in KSA, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt.

Challenges
Whereas a handful of players dominate e-commerce in Europe and North America, noon.com faces fierce competition for a share of the market that is projected to reach $69 billion in 2020. To compete effectively, the company launched with an aggressive growth plan and is hyper-focused on streamlined operations. To that end, it wants to ensure its extended workforce can execute their jobs without barriers.

As the company rapidly grew, departments were using a range of disparate tools and systems, each with unique settings and configurations. Users had to access these resources with separate passwords. They also had to call upon separate authentication methods – though in some cases, systems were not protected with two-factor authentication.

According to Peter Gesper, Senior Vice President of IT of noon.com, “It wasn’t practical for users to access needed systems in this way, nor for our system admins to manage all these tools separately. We are committed to delivering a reliable, predictable, and efficient experience for our customers and should do the same for our employees.” The company needed a way to secure its different platforms while efficiently onboarding users and streamlining administration.

Solutions
Peter and his team evaluated potential identity and access management solutions, including Okta and OneLogin. “With OneLogin, we can streamline processes while quickly identifying and dealing with cyberthreats. Plus, no other company can match OneLogin’s pre-integrated application catalog, which significantly speeds up our onboarding and offboarding,” he says.

With Single Sign-On (SSO), users only have to enter one set of credentials to access web applications in the cloud and behind the firewall, whether they are on desktops, smartphones or tablets. A number of additional OneLogin features ensure only authorized users can access sensitive data, including policy-driven password security, Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) and context-aware access management, known as SmartFactor AuthenticationTM. Noon.com can further heighten protection without impeding its users by harnessing session timeout enforcement and a self-service password reset policy. Plus, OneLogin gives admins the flexibility to implement more demanding password policies, such as required length, complexity and restrictions on password reuse.

Results
To date, noon is taking advantage of nearly 200 OneLogin connectors to enable streamlined and secure access to resources including G Suite, Zendesk, Adobe, Office 365, BambooHR and Atlassian. Moreover, with the OneLogin platform, the company has increased security and streamlined processes including automated onboarding. “The biggest advantage of OneLogin is provisioning support, enabling us to onboard hundreds of users with a few clicks,” explains Peter.

Rather than log in to each app individually, noon.com’s employees now just log in once via OneLogin and can quickly access essential applications. As a result, productivity gets a tremendous boost. At the same time, users can now reset their own passwords thus password reset requests that need to be handled by IT support have been reduced by 95%. Combined, these powerful capabilities mean the company’s system admins spend far less time supporting users and can focus on other high priority projects.

At the same time, the company is assured of strong security due to OneLogin’s SmartFactor Authentication. According to Peter, OneLogin’s adaptive MFA approach has made a significant impact. “AI-powered, context-aware multi-factor authentication was a game changer because our users just respond to a push notification on their smartphone during the login process. Since OneLogin can take into account factors such as the user’s location and IP address, the authentication process is comprehensive.”

With automated user provisioning and de-provisioning, noon.com was able to implement more control and prevent unauthorized access. The automated offboarding process means noon.com no longer worries about the possibility of manual mistakes that leave the company exposed, like ex-employees still having access to corporate applications.

“The real-time, automated provisioning and de-provisioning via OneLogin has enabled us to scale as quickly as we needed. Without this, it would have taken a team of 10 system admins to manage our user base," continues Peter. "Because of OneLogin, our three system admins can easily manage 4,000 users while being freed to focus on other projects.