Future-proofing identity by moving to the cloud
The PGA of America owns and operates several of the largest events in golf and provides an association for more than 30k members working to advance the golf community. With so many employees, fans, coaches, students, and more engaging with the brand across platforms, the company manages thousands of identities. While the company workforce was managed in one legacy solution, the rest of PGA of America’s identity footprint, including PGA.com and PGA.org was spread across multiple solutions. This multi-platform approach led to users juggling multiple passwords across different login portals. These disparate solutions were complicated for their users and also made it difficult to develop new features, which in turn impacted the company’s ability to scale.
Connected identities from the green to the go-to-market team
With Workforce Identity, PGA of America consolidated their overall tech stack management by placing identity at the center. The team saw that centralizing with Okta would help them move away from a dependency on on-premise IT to a more flexible cloud-first platform. “We were coming from a place where our users could only connect to Active Directory if they were in one of our remote offices, but with Okta, everything is seamless. It doesn’t matter if you’re in-office or on a golf course,” Scott adds. “It’s just easy.”
With Okta on board, adopting Auth0 for customer identity was “a no brainer,” Scott says. The company saw Auth0 as the “best product money could buy” because of the simplicity it provided their developers. The company saw an opportunity to more easily connect identities across the organization and offer their end users an easy experience with a single login portal and flexible social login options. Additionally, working with a single vendor for all of their identity needs meant PGA of America could focus more attention on their own projects.
Ensuring identity is invisible, so golf is the star
With their move to Okta, PGA of America has improved the flexibility and security of its identity management. With Single Sign-On and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), employees can easily access their most important tools quickly and easily. Their team is also using Okta Workflows and Lifecycle Management to automate identity workflows, creating a more connected tech stack. By integrating Okta with their HR platform, Workday, the company can provision and deprovision users with role-based access controls and ensure people have access to the tools they need when they need them. This automation means the team doesn’t have to spend time actively monitoring or maintaining identity manually and can instead focus IT resources elsewhere.
By securing accounts with MFA, PGA of America can more easily defend the company’s new cloud-based IT stack against phishing-based cyberattacks while still providing an easy, intuitive login process for users. Meanwhile, Okta ThreatInsight monitors for any suspicious login activity based on IP addresses and prompts additional authentication steps to keep accounts safe. In the event of compromised credentials, users are further secured by the Okta Workforce Identity’s breached credentials detection, which detects leaked credentials and notifies the team.
Using Auth0, the company has streamlined its wide range of fan and member identities into one platform. "The platform is pre-configured, ready to go, easy to use from a developer standpoint, and secure by default," according to Scott. His team leverages Auth0’s developer-friendly tools and pre-built templates within the Extensibility platform to build secure user journeys that verify fan identity and progressively build richer member profiles.
As far as PGA of America’s users are concerned, their login simply works, and they can access the apps and resources they need with ease. “One of the great things about using Okta and Auth0 is that they’re invisible,” Scott shares. “When our members are interacting with us, it’s a simple, easy transaction that just works. Our people can do everything they’re trying to do, and that’s a win.”
About PGA of America
PGA of America is a membership organization that works to elevate and advance the game of golf and to serve its members. PGA of America Golf Professionals are leaders who work at facilities and companies across the world to support the golf community. In addition, the company owns and operates the Ryder Cup, PGA Championship, KPMG Women’s PGA Championship, Senior PGA Championship, and more.
