How a Fortune 200 E-Commerce Leader Modernized Authorization Across 3,000 Applications

Editor's note: This customer deployed SGNL prior to its acquisition by CrowdStrike. SGNL's continuous authorization and identity orchestration capabilities are now part of CrowdStrike Falcon® Next-Gen Identity Security.

A Fortune 200 company, one of the world’s largest e-commerce organizations, depends on thousands of interconnected applications to power customer experiences and business operations. They selected SGNL to modernize authorizations and enable real-time context-aware access decisions across more than 3,000 applications.

This resulted in a scalable, policy-driven approach to authorization. The transformation eliminated a major source of production instability, centralized policy enforcement, reduced projected operating costs by hundreds of thousands of dollars annually, and established a foundation for zero standing privilege and continuous identity.

Today, the company has a more resilient authorization service that supports both its current access control requirements and its long-term identity security strategy.

The company's application ecosystem had expanded rapidly over several years, which increased demands on its workforce authorization platform. More than 3,000 applications relied on the service to make authorization decisions, making reliability and performance critical to daily business operations.

Unfortunately, the organization's legacy authorization platform had become increasingly difficult to manage. Years of custom development, complex integrations, and supporting infrastructure created significant operational overhead and made the environment expensive to maintain.

More concerningly, the platform's instability began affecting production systems. Outages disrupted business operations, which drove revenue risk and impacted customer experience. Restrictive licensing and operational complexity made it difficult for application teams to onboard new services quickly enough to keep pace with the company's growth.

Identity and access management leaders recognized that simply maintaining the existing platform was no longer sustainable. They needed a modern authorization service capable of making dynamic, real-time access decisions while providing the scalability and resilience the company required.

The company's identity and access management team launched an evaluation to replace its incumbent authorization platform with a solution that could serve as the long-term foundation for workforce authorization.

Performance, scalability, and operational simplicity ranked among the highest priorities. The team also wanted authorization decisions to incorporate real-time business context rather than relying solely on static permissions. Looking ahead, they sought a solution that could help reduce standing privilege and support broader continuous identity initiatives.

Following a comprehensive evaluation and proof of concept, the company selected SGNL because it demonstrated the ability to meet the organization's demanding technical and operational requirements. Today, those capabilities are part of Falcon Next-Gen Identity Security.

The POC demonstrated that SGNL could integrate with the company's existing identity ecosystem, support multiple authorization pathways, and replace the legacy authorization service without requiring application teams to modify their existing integrations. This allowed the organization to modernize a critical security service while minimizing operational disruption.

The implementation connected identity, business, and operational context from the company's existing systems into a centralized authorization service capable of making real-time access decisions across thousands of applications.

Rather than relying on fragmented authorization logic distributed across multiple systems, the company now manages policy from the Falcon platform to evaluate user identity, business justification, assigned responsibilities, and other contextual signals before authorizing access.

The modernized architecture also simplified policy administration. Human-readable policies made authorization decisions easier to understand and manage while providing greater consistency across applications and access patterns. Every authorization decision is logged to support auditing, compliance, and security investigations.

Just six months after deployment began, the company had fully replaced its previous authorization platform without requiring changes to dependent applications. The transition to SGNL immediately removed a significant source of production instability while giving security teams a more scalable and resilient approach to managing authorization across thousands of applications.

Replacing the legacy authorization solution delivered immediate operational and financial benefits while positioning the organization for future identity security initiatives.

Today, more than 3,000 applications rely on SGNL, which allows the company to enforce consistent policies across single sign-on, API gateways, identity governance, and privileged access workflows. The simplified architecture is projected to reduce annual operating costs by hundreds of thousands of dollars through lower licensing expenses and reduced infrastructure and administrative overhead.

Just as importantly, the organization now has a flexible foundation for implementing zero standing privilege and continuous identity across additional environments. By making authorization decisions using continuously evaluated identity and business context instead of static permissions, the company is strengthening its security posture while improving the scalability and resilience of its identity infrastructure.

Today, the recently adopted continuous authorization and identity orchestration capabilities described in this story are part of Falcon Next-Gen Identity Security, which helps organizations modernize authorization, reduce standing privilege, and make real-time access decisions across hybrid environments.