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There are things in our lives that we all need, but that we don’t notice until something goes wrong. Think of the HVAC system in your home. It keeps you cool in the summer and warm in the winter and the only time you give it a second thought is when it stops working. When it comes to building websites there are essentials like that as well. Take authorization and authentication, collectively referred to as auth, for example. Auth is necessary for managing access and keeping websites secure, but, unless something goes wrong, it’s mostly taken for granted.

If your AC breaks down in the summer you might have to sweat it out for a day until a repair person comes; when a website is hacked or an account is hijacked, the damage to your organization and its reputation could cost millions. Auth is important, but at the same time creating your own auth infrastructure is time-consuming and laden with risk. In this post, we share our thoughts on how identity platform Stytch can help organizations secure their websites while giving time back to developers to focus on business-critical features.

Why Reinvent the Wheel?

At Foster Made, we believe that the future is composable. Headless, composable architectures let you pick the components – CMS, Search, Auth – that make the most sense for your organization’s needs. Stytch can provide a number of modern authentication methods, like single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, magic links, passkeys, and one-time passwords. At the same time, it’s easy to integrate and provides true out-of-the-box functionality. 

Given its security implications, Auth implementation involves many well-established standards and protocols. If clear best practices already exist, and someone has already done it well, why do it again?

Buying a Product, Getting Expertise

Not only does Stytch save you from having to reinvent the wheel, it also gives you peace of mind by taking on the security risks that would normally have to be dealt with in-house.

Take passwords for instance. In a traditional system, a user submits their password, your website hashes the password, and then it’s saved to a database that you have to manage. As we’ve seen time and again, these databases can and do get hacked, and even hashing passwords doesn’t completely protect them from ambitious cyber criminals. With Stytch, you’re offloading that responsibility, which greatly reduces your attack surface. 

You don’t completely eliminate your security concerns when you use Stytch; no company could ever make promises like that. But Stytch lives and dies by its security posture and the features they offer, and the level of expertise they have far exceeds anything that a typical web development firm or in-house developer has.

Future-Proofing Auth

Speaking of expertise, when you use a microservice like Stytch you also get to reap the benefits of the ongoing investments they make in their product. One of the strongest arguments for composable is that the individual components you use are constantly being updated. With a minimal amount of coding, you’re able to get the most up-to-date products that your chosen vendor offers. 

For example, we recently migrated a client's complicated auth system to Stytch. This integration was able to supplement the baseline security features of the website and offload some of its security risk to Stytch. It also future-proofed their site to a certain degree because they can continue to take advantage of Stytch’s innovations. In a world where cybersecurity firms are in a never-ending arms race with cyber criminals, there’s a clear advantage to always having the latest technology.

Focusing on What We Do Best

Let’s carry our HVAC metaphor from the beginning of this post one step further. When a contractor builds a house, do they ever build the heat pump or furnace from scratch? Of course not! They get it from one of half a dozen major brands. Why? Because the time and resources it takes to design and build a heat pump from scratch make it cost-prohibitive, and the result would never be as good as what the HVAC manufacturers can make. Buying existing hardware allows contractors to focus on their strengths to deliver the features customers want. If you’ve ever watched one of those home-flipper shows you’ve heard people extol the beauty of a parquet floor or intricate crown molding; have you ever heard the same said about a heat pump? 

Of course, developers are never starting entirely from scratch. Traditionally, they’ve started with the baseline auth and security features offered by content management systems and web application frameworks. But security in general, and auth specifically, can be difficult to implement and maintain. With Stytch, you just have to write a minimum amount of code to implement it into your project and they handle the rest. This frees developers up to work on features that set your organization apart. 

Here at Foster Made, that can mean helping you make the transition to composable, looking for ways to boost your site’s performance, or focusing on other business-critical features that set you apart from the competition while trusting Stych to do the auth-related heavy lifting.

Conclusion

Want to make the move to composable, or learn more about integrating Stytch into your composable website? At Foster Made, we can help you navigate your options and develop a plan to ensure your website performs optimally – not just in terms of security and functionality, but from a business perspective. Make sure your website is working hard for you – making visitors happy and driving sales and engagement.

To schedule a 30-minute Discovery Call, contact us today!