Gamania Group: Swiftly realizing unified identity management across multiple domains

Gamania Group: Swiftly realizing unified identity management across multiple domains

As one of the fastest-growing digital service providers in Taiwan, Gamania Group has been broadening its technology expertise to offer more innovative services. Founded in 1995, the group first established its fame as a game developer and distributor operating more than a dozen of online games, including Lineage, one of the most popular video games in East Asia of all time. The company has been listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange since 2002.

Based on its success in gaming, Gamania Group has rapidly expanded its business to e-commerce, online payment, media, mobile life, and information security over the past two decades through continuous mergers and acquisitions. The group currently operates more than 10 website domains with 1,000+ employees working in branch offices across Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong.

The quick business growth brought exciting opportunities but also created new challenges. Following a series of mergers, Gamania Group relies on a wide range of internal systems across multiple web domains for daily operations. These systems were developed by various parties and deployed in different on-prem or cloud environments, which resulted in multiple identity portals. Although Gamania Group had tried several methods, including Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and one-time password (OTP) authentication, to realize unified identity management, the goal was far to be reached due to the high discrepancy between different systems. As a result, the group’s employees needed to remember several credential sets to conduct their daily work.

“Having multiple identity portals in one company was a huge blockage keeping our employees from reaching higher productivity. It also complicated our identity management and brought information security risks,” says Paul Ding, information security consultant at Gamania Group. “Therefore, in 2021 we decided to revamp the authentication mechanisms across all platforms and establish a unified login experience.”

At first, Gamania Group considered commissioning an external vendor to build a custom identity portal. However, building a new portal would take a long time, and the new portal would need to be adjusted every time the group incorporates new systems in the future. With finding an effective and sustainable solution in mind, Gamania Group eventually chose to adopt Okta Workforce Identity Cloud to unify identity and access.

An easy-to-adopt, comprehensive authentication solution

According to Ding, there are three main reasons why Gamania Group turned to Okta for a unified identity management solution. First, as a software provider, the group has long been on a mission of transforming all its digital services into Software as a Service (SaaS). By providing a SaaS authentication solution, Okta perfectly matches Gamania Group’s IT development plan.

Secondly, Ding found that Okta provides the most comprehensive documentation after reviewing several authentication solutions. In Okta’s documentation, the way of use of each API is explained in detail, which enables Gamania Group to easily build the identity management model that it desires by leveraging various APIs.

Lastly but most importantly, Okta is highly compliant and compatible with other authentication mechanisms. While providing services in compliance with major international security standards like HIPAA, PCI-DSS, SOX and ISO 27001/27018/27017, Okta supports most of the authentication protocols on the market. By adopting Okta, Gamania Group can not only ensure a high level of information security across all its web domains, but also swiftly connect all its existing authentication mechanisms with Okta through simple codes.

“We’ve evaluated many authentication systems, and Okta stood out as the best option for us,” explains Ding. “Its SaaS identity management solution fully meets our needs in terms of usability and information security, and can be easily integrated with all our systems.”

Realizing unified identity management in 12 weeks

In July 2022, Gamania Group started implementing Okta Workforce Identity Cloud in partnership with Odin, one of Okta’s agents in Taiwan. The pair reviewed the authentication mechanisms of Gamania Group’s Active Directory tenancies and Google Workspace accounts, and designed a Single Sign-On system enabled by Okta that uses the on-prem Active Directory as the main identity source and executes the authentication on Google Workspace through Okta Integration Network. Gamania Group also employs Okta Adaptive Multi-Factor Authentication in all login processes for greater account security.

Overall, it only took Gamania Group 12 weeks to unify the identity management of its more than 10 web domains, cloud applications and VPN systems through Okta. Ding notes that the high compatibility and easy-to-use nature of Okta’s tools have offered great help. If the group had adopted a custom authentication solution developed by an external party, it would have spent up to 12 months to reach the same result.

“We’re impressed by how quickly Okta has helped us realize unified identity management across so many web domains and various computing environments. Within only 12 weeks, we successfully removed the management and work efficiency obstacle that had lingered for years,” he adds.

Delivering a highly efficient and flexible login experience

Now, Gamania Group’s more than 1,000 employees can effortlessly log into all the internal systems with only one credential set. All they have to do is open the identity portal that Gamania Group built during the adoption process and complete the authentication process powered by Okta’s redirect model. 

On top of that, Gamania Group leverages Okta’s embedded model to establish a push notification service, which enables its employees to access all the internal applications through passwordless authentication powered by Okta FastPass on any mobile devices.  

“The adoption of Okta marked a significant change in the ways how our staff conduct their daily work,” notes Ding. “Our employees no longer need to switch back and forth between different login systems and can smoothly access any app features they need with one single account. They are therefore able to focus on their work without being bothered by complex authentication processes.”

Building a sustainable way to manage identity

Besides work efficiency, Gamania Group’s internal account management has also been improved. By establishing a self-service password reset system, the group allows its employees to change or reset their passwords by themselves either through the Okta platform in cloud or the on-prem Windows platform. This has greatly reduced the identity management workloads of Gamania Group’s IT team.

As Gamania Group continues to expand its business, using Okta for authentication unification also means that it doesn’t have to worry about identity management integration in the future. Through Okta, the group can easily connect any new systems to its current authentication mechanism, saving a lot of development and management effort in the future. 

Ding says, “Okta has helped us significantly enhance productivity and management efficiency by offering a secure, all-inclusive authentication solution. What’s even better is that we can continue using the same mechanism no matter how big our company grows in the future.”

About Gamania Group

Gamania is a listed digital entertainment corporation based in Taipei, Taiwan. Built on solid performance as a PC online game distributor, the group continues to proactively expand business territories in various fields such as e-commerce, digital media, online retail and payment, and original content, all of which are strung together by beanfun!, a digital entertainment portal and online community, in its ultimate mission to develop a diversified digital ecosystem. For more information, see: https://www.gamania.com/