Replacing Legacy Logins with Azure AD Across Multiple Applications

Context

At Indigo (InterGlobe Aviation) I worked across several enterprise applications, each carrying its own legacy authentication. Duplicated login logic, inconsistent sessions, a fragmented sign-in experience — the usual cost of auth that grew app-by-app instead of being designed once.

The work was to replace all of it with Azure Active Directory as a single identity provider. (Alongside it, I replaced legacy scheduler-based jobs with flight-data synchronization web services, improving sync performance by 8%.)

Why centralize on a standard

The tempting shortcut is to patch each app's slow login individually. But that leaves every application with its own auth code — its own bugs, its own session quirks, no single sign-on, no unified governance.

Standardizing on Azure AD over OIDC and OAuth2 replaced that bespoke logic with one well-optimized standard flow. That's where the 25% login-performance improvement came from: not a clever trick, but deleting a pile of slow custom code and replacing it with a standard the identity provider has already optimized.

Authorization, not just authentication

Authentication answers who are you; authorization answers what can you do. I carried roles on the token and enforced RBAC consistently, so access decisions stopped being ad-hoc per-app logic and became uniform and auditable.

What broke

The honest part: an early token-validation config left token-lifetime and clock-skew tolerance on assumptions that didn't hold, which showed up as intermittent re-auth prompts in testing. Intermittent is the worst kind of auth bug to chase. The non-negotiable parts of validation — verifying the token signature against the provider's published keys and checking the issuer and audience claims — were never the problem; it was the timing assumptions. Once I made lifetime, refresh, and skew tolerance explicit, it was solid — and that's now the first thing I nail down on any OIDC integration.

Outcomes

Multiple enterprise applications moved onto a single governed identity layer with single sign-on, the standardized login flow measured about 25% faster than the legacy paths, and authorization became consistent across apps.