Pitney Bowes Achieves Greater Scale, Reliability for Global E-Commerce Platform with F5 + Okta

This global technology company has pushed the boundaries of technology for almost 100 years. Pitney Bowes continues to do so by using Okta + F5 Networks to help  their over 2.8 million users access new digital services through the Pitney Bowes’ Commerce Cloud. 

In 2016, Pitney Bowes launched a complete e-commerce solution that streamlined everything from international payments to sales promotions. The Pitney Bowes Commerce Cloud offers a suite of global e-commerce capabilities delivered to customers and partners via  mobile and the web. From the very beginning, Pitney Bowes knew that they needed best-of-breed identity solutions to keep their Commerce Cloud secure for its millions of users.

A Complex Environment

The migration to the Commerce Cloud was not easy: Pitney Bowes’ IT environment contained multiple legacy and cloud-based apps, each with its own internal federations. Access to each of these had to be streamlined in order to perform the migration without causing outages.

“Outages translate to lost capabilities and lost access for customers,” says Henry Rogando, Principal Software Architect at Pitney Bowes. “As such, it was important to find a highly reliable mechanism that could migrate these applications without introducing new issues.” Essentially, Pitney Bowes needed to simplify the worflow by running cloud-based and legacy apps through Okta in a safe and reliable way.

Enter F5 + Okta

To further scale and secure customer access to Commerce Cloud, Pitney Bowes turned to Okta’s integration with F5 Networks. Pitney Bowes was already using F5 Networks for load balancing via the BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager(LTM). By adding the BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) module, Pitney Bowes leveraged the Okta + F5  Networks integration to replace its legacy access management gateway. Now Okta worked as the authentication point, and F5 Networks helped with the reverse proxy requirements. Okta and F5 Networks provided a streamlined solution for access to both cloud and on-prem applications.

With single sign-on (SSO) enabled alongside the new integration, Pitney Bowes’ customers are able to navigate between all of the apps, cloud-based or on-prem, without experiencing any kind of disruption.

Thanks to the Okta + F5 Networks integration, Pitney Bowes successfully migrated their entire portal and launched a robust e-commerce offering. And the best part? They pulled it all off without disrupting any of their 2.8 million users.

To view the full case study, click here.