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Nikkei Inc. chooses Authlete to revamp its 11 million users “Nikkei ID” system

Improve flexibility, development productivity and operational efficiency by deployment of Authlete through in-house production, and achieving the level of OAuth 2.0 / OpenID Connect compliant security

We are pleased to announce that Nikkei Inc. has chosen the Authlete solution.

Since 1876, Nikkei has been providing valuable information to business people for 140 years. In 2010, they launched the Nikkei online edition in addition to its flagship publication, the Nikkei News Paper. The Nikkei ID is the system used for logging in to various services within Nikkei Group, including the NIKKEI online edition and Nikkei Business online edition by Nikkei Business Publications, Inc.

Nikkei has chosen Authlete as the solution for its ID/API security of the Nikkei ID. Yoko Kuramochi, General Manager of DX Promotion Office, discussed the benefits of Authlete’s adoption.

The Nikkei ID is a system built by the Nihon Keizai Shimbun Group to ensure relationship with its readers and users. This was released in 2010, since then the service has expanded, and its membership now reaches 11 million users. However, more than 10 years have passed since the system was released, and the infrastructure of the Nikkei ID requires more flexibility, scalability, and operability. Therefore, we made a decision to renew the system on new infrastructure.

While the development of the new Nikkei ID infrastructure has been done in-house more than ever, the OAuth 2.0 / OpenID Connect (OIDC) functionality has been externalized to Authlete. This means that we no longer need to dedicate engineering resources to implement OAuth/OIDC specifications, especially to keep up with security-related updates. We can now focus on building a flexible system that can easily incorporate evolving authentication and authorization technologies.

And unlike other identity and access management software or IDaaS, Authlete is a component that can be embedded as part of a service. This allowed us to achieve high productivity in our system development by leveraging our own standard technology stack, including Kotlin, Spring Framework, TypeScript, and React, for the overall implementation, while delegating only OAuth/OIDC processing to Authlete.

This case study will be published soon. In the meantime, you can look at the Customers section on our website.