Copyright Licensing Agency
Launch a new entitlements service in three months
How we helped the CLA take an entitlements platform from concept to live services and user interfaces in three months, including Azure AD-backed SSO and practical administration tooling.
Some projects are about deep estate transformation. Others are about taking an idea from zero to live fast, without sacrificing the engineering discipline needed for a service people will actually rely on.
The CLA engagement was firmly in the second category.
What made this interesting
The target was not just to stand up an application quickly. It was to deliver an entitlement service that could deal with identity, roles, authorisation, operational actions, and internal administration in a way that felt coherent from the start.
That is a lot to get right when the timescale is short.
Three months from concept to operational service
We helped deliver the CLA entitlements platform from concept to working services and user interfaces within three months.
Speed mattered, but the work only counted because it was useful on day one.
That meant solving for two things at once:
- secure access through custom single sign-on backed by Azure Active Directory
- operational capability for the teams actually running the service
The second point is often the one that gets missed. Internal platforms do not succeed just because the authentication is technically sound. They succeed because the people using them can carry out the real work they need to do.
Building the operational layer properly
We developed administrative capability for simulations, refunds, batch processing, invoicing, and related workflows.
That gave the service an operational backbone rather than leaving business users dependent on engineering support for every exception or back-office action.
It is the kind of detail that turns a system from “technically built” into “genuinely usable”.
The technical mix
The delivery combined Azure-hosted services with Java, Spring, security design, and supporting UI work. JWT-based access control, role modelling, and security testing all formed part of the picture, but the project never disappeared into security theatre. The goal was a secure service that still moved at the pace the organisation needed.
What this story says about us
We want Port60 to come across as a team that can do both kinds of work:
- longer modernisation programmes where complexity is accumulated over years
- shorter, sharper delivery where a new platform needs to go from idea to operational use quickly
CLA is a good example of the second. It shows that we can move fast, keep structure, and deliver something that stands up in real use rather than just in a sprint review.