Scaling Single-Sign-On with the Swiss Alpine Club

Mountain climbers and hikers in the Alps need reliable assistance, and that’s exactly what the Swiss Alpine Club (SAC) provides. Established in 1863, SAC is passionate about alpinism. They’ve contributed to the development of the Alpine region over the centuries and are advocates of safe, responsible mountaineering whilst ensuring free access to the mountain world.

Today, SAC has approximately 150,000 members, 111 sections in Switzerland that manage 153 mountain huts. On average, SAC sees 1 million daily visitors to these huts. SAC offers a range of services to both members and non-members. They have a SAC route portal, manage an online store with SAC products, offer discounts for accommodation, organize educational and training opportunities, and much more. Furthermore, SAC relies heavily their 7,000 volunteers who work as officials, guides, and youth organizers. These volunteers are supported by SAC’s IT office, which is located in the Swiss city of Bern.

Integration and Identity Management for User Convenience

SAC defined their digital strategy 2 years ago, and the cornerstone of this strategy is easy usage and access of services for their members and non-members. To this end, they had a straightforward set of goals which include: one identity login across all SAC services, single-sign-on (SSO) to access different services, easy onboarding of members, and to provide self-management of user accounts. SAC has around half a million users (this number keeps growing daily) and there are about 6,000 roles. Given the number of roles and types of membership (for example, officials, wardens, subscribers, etc.) means that there is a quite complex identity management structure at SAC.

SAC worked together with WSO2 Certified Integration Partner Avintis to implement their strategy. Right from the beginning of this project, both SAC and Avintis agreed on the consolidation of SAC’s user store. SAC’s new solution is composed of 2 parts - one part is concerned with integration and the other focuses on authentication, powered by WSO2 Enterprise Integrator (which can be used to build, scale, and secure integration solutions) and WSO2 Identity Server (which is a uniquely flexible product for identity needs) respectively. Being open source, both WSO2 Enterprise Integrator and WSO2 Identity Server provide SAC with a solution to avoid vendor and data lock-in, and use open standards for identity management and integration. This also further enables SAC to keep abreast with ever changing market needs.

The solution has a bi-directional integration with Microsoft Dynamics NAV and WSO2 Enterprise Integrator. They’ve also implemented REST based web services. This solution also consists of one master user store, with multiple service providers. At present, they have 6 service providers but this could potentially increase to 100 depending on the speed at which their implementation progresses. SAC translates their business cases to their user store and assign the right roles in the user store. They’ve created a login app on top of WSO2 Identity Server, which received the customer services that passes through WSO2 Enterprise Integrator. Furthermore, the identity management component follows the OpenID connect protocol.

The Result: One Login App for Everything (Literally)

SAC has reduced their data silos with the new solution. The resulting single login app facilitates user authentication, registration, membership applications, account activation, and password resets. Users can now book accommodation, subscribe to SAC services, shop in the online store, and access any other service with one single identity.

SAC’s plans extend beyond creating a seamless and convenient user experience. They’re now looking at WSO2 API Manager (which can be used to address any spectrum of the API lifecycle, monetization, and policy enforcement) for secure access to and management of upcoming/ existing APIs. In order to achieve scalability and reduce downtimes to zero, SAC runs most of the applications in Docker containers using Jelastic PaaS, and plans to migrate all of their web infrastructure to this cloud platform.

With plenty of changes anticipated in the near future (along with rising numbers of visitors to the Alps), Daniel Fernandez, head of IT at SAC, advises meticulous planning when undertaking a digital transformation project of this nature. And in addition to planning, he advocates being prepared for unexpected situations, as in his opinion a project such as this has an impact on everything else in an enterprise.

Listen to Daniel’s presentation for more details on how SAC implemented SSO.

WSO2 API Manager, WSO2 Enterprise Integrator, and WSO2 Identity Server form the WSO2 Integration Agile Platform. Learn all about our open source approach here.