Echelon, an AI startup that automates enterprise software implementations, was seeking a robust, flexible B2B authentication platform that could help them deliver granular authentication and access control to their enterprise customers while keeping Echelon’s developers focused on the core product. Learn why Descope balanced platform agility and team hustle with the scale and security required by Echelon’s Fortune 500 customers.
About Echelon
Echelon is an AI platform that automates enterprise IT development, operations, and managed services to help accelerate notoriously slow and subpar rollouts. Its AI agents are specifically trained to handle end-to-end ServiceNow implementations, compressing timelines from months to days while saving resources otherwise spent on offshore developers and implementation consulting firms with inconsistent results.
Echelon’s focus on the enterprise market meant that B2B authentication, SSO, and account security were table stakes. Moreover, their deep alignment with ServiceNow necessitated the need to securely call and store ServiceNow APIs on behalf of users and tenant admins.
Anand Sainath, Co-Founder and Head of Engineering at Echelon, said:
“Echelon works with Fortune 500 organizations with rigorous enterprise requirements. While the agility and modernity of an agentic AI company is built into our DNA, we must always treat identity and security aspects as a first order concern.”
Seeking a future-proof authentication provider
Echelon initially developed some parts of their authentication stack in-house but soon ran into issues of accuracy and completeness. It also became apparent that keeping their team focused on innovating their core product offering meant offloading “solved problems” like authentication and SSO to a dedicated provider.
In addition to strong SSO and SCIM support, the Echelon platform also needed role-based access control (RBAC) and per-tenant management for each enterprise client. The goal of serving large, global enterprises also meant going with an authentication system that already met enterprise requirements: this included multi-region data residency, the ability to serve multiple identity providers per tenant, and FedRAMP High Authorization.
Anand Sainath, Co-Founder and Head of Engineering at Echelon, said:
“As an agentic system, authentication is central to our customer experience. We learned pretty quickly that we didn’t want to take any shortcuts with auth and wanted a partner that could serve our needs now as well as months and years into the future.”
The Descope experience
After a detailed POC with multiple vendors, Echelon chose Descope because the solution provided their team with a suite of tools to manage enterprise-grade authentication and delegate identity management to their customers.
Anand Sainath, Co-Founder and Head of Engineering at Echelon, said:
“The big unlock with Descope has been the ability to offload identity management to our customer admins. Each customer gets bespoke SSO onboarding and tenant-level isolation without causing any bottlenecks for our engineers.”
Many Descope capabilities helped Echelon make their decision, including the following:
Low / no-code flow builder: Descope Flows let the Echelon team design authentication journeys visually, abstracting away developer complexity and freeing up time to focus on their core product.
Multiple authentication methods: The ability to mix and match authentication methods such as username / password, SSO, magic links, and social logins.
Deep SSO support: Descope supported IdP-initiated SSO and multiple identity providers per tenant, both of which were critical to meet enterprise identity requirements.
Simplified onboarding and configuration: Echelon customers could self-configure their SSO and SCIM connections and control granular settings at the tenant level rather than relying on the Echelon team’s support for every change.
ServiceNow token management / storage: Descope provided a secure token vault that could enable Echelon’s AI agents to securely call ServiceNow APIs on behalf of customer tenant admins and users.
Future-proof architecture: Descope’s multi-tenant architecture, support for multi-region data residency, and FedRAMP High deployments aligned with Echelon’s go-to-market goals.
Active and responsive support: The Descope developer relations team were in constant communication with the Echelon team, providing the needed documentation and support to accelerate the POC and eventual go-live.
Anand Sainath, Co-Founder and Head of Engineering at Echelon, said:
“The Descope POC was very smooth - we were able to implement a working version of customer auth within a week. A few weeks down the line and we’re already in production. We plan to roll out auth for our ServiceNow AI agents next. Descope rollouts go as fast or slow as we want them to.”
“Descoping” enterprise IT implementations
Descope provided an enterprise-ready foundation for Echelon’s authentication stack, offering a number of benefits:
Developer productivity: No / low code workflows and SDKs provide the building blocks for authentication without consuming developer resources.
Empowered customers: Delegating identity management to customers allows enterprise tenant admins to onboard to Echelon’s platform asynchronously, accelerating onboarding and enhancing Echelon’s brand as an enterprise-ready product.
Secure defaults: Descope’s ability to abstract complex security infrastructure lowered the risk of accidental misconfigurations and security oversights–managing auth in-house would have meant the Echelon developers shouldering this responsibility.
Scalable multi-tenancy: Echelon could now manage complex, tenant-specific auth parameters across enterprise customers, IdPs, and regions, all with minimal coding and engineering intervention.
Flexible, scalable authentication and identity management stands to become a competitive advantage for Echelon as they continue growing in the months and years ahead. The agentic IT platform can move at startup speed while giving enterprise customers the confidence of secure, scoped, consented access at all times.
Anand Sainath, Co-Founder and Head of Engineering at Echelon, said:
“We’d recommend Descope to any startup that has its sights set on the long term. The platform provides the quick time to value and abstraction that lean startup teams need, while also supporting infrastructural requirements that enterprises require.”
Descope is a flexible drag & drop customer and agentic identity platform that helps organizations easily add authentication, authorization, and identity management to their apps, AI agents, and MCP servers. Customers use us for initiatives such as passwordless authentication, SSO, identity federation, strong MFA, fraud prevention, and agentic identity.
To get started with Descope, sign up for a Free Forever account. If you have questions about our platform, book time with our auth experts.
