Redington Gulf Implements User Authentication and Mobile Data Service on AWS

Redington Gulf provides end-to-end supply chain solutions for all categories of Information Technology products (PCs, PC building blocks, networking, software and enterprise solution products) and Consumer and Lifestyle products (Telecom, Digital Lifestyle products, Entertainment products and Digital Printing Machines) to over 100 international brands and relationship with major brands have been for years. Redington Gulf (a subsidiary of Redington India) is among the leading supply chain solution providers in Middle East, Africa, Turkey and CIS region for leading manufacturers of Information Technology, Telecom and Lifestyle products.

Redington Gulf has embarked on a Digital Transformation initiative where widening their market base leveraging their huge presence across the METACIS geography is a key imperative. They have a large ecosystem of Partners and Resellers across the region and providing them a seamless and intuitive digital experience is a key success factor to this initiative. Not to lose sight of security and enhanced user experience at the time of on boarding Partners and Partner Entities

They wanted to make sure that user registration, email verification, reset password, forgot password options are available to their customers with an intuitive interface. Customer on boarding workflow customization is a key requirement so that business policies can be followed accurately. Maintaining a single repository of identities cutting across multiple services offered on the B2B portal was required from a Master Data Management (MDM) perspective as well. In summary, ease of use, single source of truth, enhanced security policy requirements with minimal customization was the objective that Redington Gulf wanted to achieve.

Considering the requirements holistically, a cloud based solution was the choice that the architecture team narrowed down upon. Solution chosen has to support a wide variety of development platforms given that the B2B portal will progressively grow its footprint and different services offered may have different development language requirements. With this context and background, the Redington Gulf IT architecture team chose Amazon Cognito as the authentication and authorization platform for this initiative. Following are the reasons why Cognito was chosen:

• Support for different languages including JavaScript.
• Single source for variety of applications that can scale across various services (current & future).
• Aligning well with the MDM strategy of the organization (single source of truth)
• Industry proven secure infrastructure.
• Readily built support for multi-factor authentication and other commonly required features like email verification, SMS based OTP.

By using Amazon Cognito, the B2B has acquired an innate capability to support customer on boarding without any customized coding. Entire verification and notification process that come as part of on boarding is completely driven via Cognito hence driving down overall cost of the solution immensely.

Customers/Partners have a digitally enhanced experience while signing-up for services, ease of use and navigate-ability of the portal make the overall sign-up process time efficient. Enhanced and industry proven security features and capabilities of Cognito mean that Redington IT should not have to opt for third party checks, vulnerability assessments etc. thereby increasing the time to market of the solution.

I am not hassled anymore with maintaining a separate secure infrastructure for managing my e-Commerce platform identities. Our technology consulting partner Citrus Consulting Services helped us identify and implement AWS Cognito solution — Sunil Dsouza, Vice President of Redington Gulf IT.

Cost effectiveness of Cognito services and zero capex on the solution have resulted in an overall TCO reduction for the solution.

Amazon Cognito is the core of the user identity architecture component in the overall B2B solution architecture. Amazon Cognito’s User Pool feature has been leveraged to have user identities created on the basis of their email address entered. During sign-up, a user is expected to enter their email address which is then immediately verified by Amazon Cognito by sending a verification code. On successful completion of verification using that code, a user is allowed to create his/her own password. Subsequent logins are directly integrated with Amazon Cognito from the B2B portal. Similarly, reset password and forgot password options completely leverage Amazon Cognito’s functionality thereby not requiring any special or customized coding on the B2B portal. JavaScript is the language option that has been adapted.