A Cloud Guru Saves

Over $550,000 AUD

Annually by Using
Auth0
 CASE STUDY

A Cloud Guru Saves Over $550,000

AUD Annually by Using Auth0
Cloud computing education giant uses Auth0 identity
services to shave weeks off project times

About A Cloud Guru

We're on a mission to teach the world to cloud. Why? Because we think the cloud
means a brighter future for people and organizations. Founded in 2015 by
brothers Sam and Ryan Kroonenburg, A Cloud Guru (ACG) began as a single cloud
certification course and has grown into the leading online cloud training platform.
More than a million people have taken courses with ACG. We help novices,
techies, and teams alike level up their cloud skills, prepare for certification exams,
and progress through learning paths to become gurus in digital and cloud
transformation.

E-Learning APAC
INDUSTRY REGION

1 auth0.com
 CASE STUDY

A Cloud Guru was founded in 2015 with the goal of better educating engineers on
cloud services. The organization boasts over 800,000 students currently enrolled
in courses covering major cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS),
Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and others. As cloud services become
increasingly common across many different industries, A Cloud Guru hopes to
help both individuals and organizations quickly gain the skills they need to thrive
in an ever-changing technical landscape.

“Our vision is to teach the world to cloud,” explains John McKim, VP of Product &

Technology at A Cloud Guru. “Organizations with maybe a 10-year history, who
might have been built up pre-cloud, they are seeing competitors adopt the cloud
and leverage the benefits from that. But they might have a large number of
employees that aren’t very familiar or aren’t skilled in the cloud. So, we’re
providing them a solution where they can give their employees access to our
cloud training and also accelerate the adoption of the cloud within their
organizations.”

“We’re seeing a big wave of cloud adoption coming along,” he continues. “There’s

a lot of traditional IT roles, whether that’s a network engineering role or an
operational role or even development roles, that might have a strong background
in on premise infrastructure or not a lot of cloud computing exposure. We’re
helping that big group of people get upskilled really quickly on the cloud.”

"Our vision is to teach the world to cloud."

John McKim, VP of Product & Technology

2 auth0.com
 CASE STUDY

MAINTAINING THE TRUST OF CUSTOMERS

Fortune 500 companies in financial services, telecommunications, consulting, and
manufacturing are upskilling their employees through A Cloud Guru. With so many
important businesses relying on their services, it made sense for A Cloud Guru to
find an authentication partner they could trust, enabling their own developers to
focus on their primary offerings.

“Identity is really important,” says McKim. “It’s a base level need for any SaaS
platform. But building an identity platform ourselves is not going to provide
differentiated value for our customers. That’s why we chose Auth0 to be our
identity solution. It’s a product that we can rely on which enables us to focus on
delivering education, which is the core value of our product.”

Auth0 provides A Cloud Guru with Single Sign On (SSO) services, giving users
unified login credentials. With over 800,000 users ranging from individuals to
employees of major corporations, keeping those credentials secure is crucial.

“Customers want to know that their data is going to be protected and secured,
and identity is a critical part of that,” says McKim. “Having confidence that the
systems that hold their very personal information… is really critical. That’s why we
like to use Auth0.”

“I feel very secure with Auth0 managing authentication,” he continues. “We

obviously place a lot of trust in the Auth0 team and the platform to do that
appropriately. It gives me confidence that there’s good practices happening and
that our customers’ information is secure.”

3 auth0.com
 CASE STUDY

“Customers want to know that their data is going to be

protected and secured, and identity is a critical part of that.
Having confidence that the systems that hold their very
personal information… is really critical. That’s why we like to
use Auth0.”

John McKim, VP of Product & Technology

AN AUTHENTICATION SOLUTION READY FOR MARKET IN

JUST WEEKS
One of the most important reasons A Cloud Guru chose to work with Auth0 was
Auth0’s ability to build a reliable authentication solution that would be ready to hit
the market in less than a month.

“When Sam Kroonenburg, one of the founders of A Cloud Guru, picked Auth0, it
was because he built the first version of the platform in the space of three
weeks,” says McKim. “He needed to get something out to market as quickly as
possible, and you cannot build your own identity platform within that time period.
Adopting Auth0 was a really good way to really rapidly get to market.”

Even if they had built it in house, McKim notes that the time and money involved
would have been prohibitive.

“It would potentially be a team of maybe four to five people,” he says, explaining
that each member of the team would lose at least one week of productivity per
month just to maintain the system. “That team would approximately cost, I’m
going to say, $550,000 AUD a year. It’s often, I think, underestimated how much
does go into identity and some of those parts of the platform.”

Fortunately, A Cloud Guru has had little reason to reconsider the decision to use
Auth0.

4 auth0.com
 CASE STUDY

“Auth0 just works,” McKim says. “And we don’t have to worry about it too much.”

“He needed to get something out to market as quickly as

possible, and you cannot build your own identity platform
within that time period. Adopting Auth0 was a really good
way to really rapidly get to market.”

John McKim, VP of Product & Technology

ABOUT AUTH0
Auth0 provides a platform to authenticate, authorize, and secure access for
applications, devices, and users. Security and application teams rely on Auth0's
simplicity, extensibility, and expertise to make identity work for everyone.
Safeguarding billions of login transactions each month, Auth0 secures identities
so innovators can innovate, and empowers global enterprises to deliver trusted,
superior digital experiences to their customers around the world.For more
information, visit https://auth0.com or follow @auth0 on Twitter.

5 auth0.com