Center Parcs - Auth0 Migration
Nasstar reduces costs and complexity with a scalable security platform
Center Parcs UK and Ireland offers short breaks for families at six forest locations. Each village is home to self-catering accommodation, the Subtropical Swimming Paradise, activities, restaurants, shops and more, all in a peaceful forest setting.
Center Parcs has an intuitive online booking system for guests at all locations. As more people choose to go on a short break with Center Parcs, the organisation is set to become a greater target for cybercriminals. To ensure it remains well protected, Nasstar and Center Parcs recently embarked on a critical platform migration.
Using the latest digital engineering techniques, Nasstar designed and implemented a migration from Center Parcs’ existing customer identity provider to Auth0. The move to Auth0 would reduce costs, improve security, enhance the customer experience, and ensure Center Parcs identity management solution could scale and evolve with its business requirements.
Services
Amazon Web Services
Identity & Access Management
Amazon Route53
Amazon API Gateway
Amazon EventBridge
AWS Lambda
Amazon S3
Amazon Key Management Service
The Brief
Center Parcs is committed to providing excellent services, including through its digital platforms. However, any breach in security could expose sensitive data and harm its reputation. That's why a strong identity security solution was essential to trust and operational integrity.
To address evolving security needs, enhance performance, and optimise costs, Nasstar partnered with Center Parcs to create a solution that leverages serverless AWS technologies and integrates with the business’s AWS-hosted data warehouse. The new solution enables continuous event flow, including new user registrations and profile updates to maintain data integrity.
The Benefits
With an approach that was designed and implemented to provide a smooth transition to Auth0, Nasstar worked closely with Center Parcs to ensure that all required resources were provisioned and that events flowed through the AWS components as expected.
Enhanced security: The Auth0 solution is backed by strict security controls, including Amazon’s Key Management Service which safeguards all data stored in S3, such as sensitive personally identifiable information (PII). Any required access to this data is tightly controlled and monitored.
Cost efficiency: Using serverless tools like EventBridge, Lambda, and S3, the solution reduces AWS costs by matching resource usage to actual demand. This way, the business avoids keeping unused resources running during low-traffic times.
Observability: The deployment of CloudWatch, an AWS-native monitoring tool, provides Center Parcs with comprehensive metrics for each of its resources. The organisation now benefits from a high degree of end-to-end infrastructure observability, real-time alerting, and feedback.
The Solution
The work began as Nasstar deployed a REST API via a temporary Amazon API Gateway. This served as a secure bridge for transferring user data to Center Parcs' Auth0 account. Nasstar also developed and deployed a separate long-term solution to handle ongoing user events from Auth0.
Integration with Auth0's event stream was accomplished by connecting to a custom Amazon EventBridge event bus that captures specific activities. When one of these events meets the criteria, it is routed to a serverless Lambda function and subsequently stored in an Amazon S3 bucket. Center Parcs further processes these events before storing each in its data warehouse.
Nasstar used version-controlled Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and Terraform to provision the required cloud-native AWS services, supporting the new solution to ensure accuracy and repeatability during deployments.
Both the initial migration and ongoing event handling were successful, delivering tangible improvements to Center Parcs’ data integrity, operational efficiency, and scalability.
With the expert guidance of Nasstar and a scalable security platform, we at Center Parcs have significantly reduced costs, improved the integrity of our online booking system, and enhanced the overall customer experience through the seamless migration to Auth0.