Understanding Environments, Applications and Clients

Environments, Applications, and Clients are core architectural concepts in Next Identity. Together, they form the foundation of how identity experiences are structured, deployed, and managed within the platform. Understanding their roles helps ensure your configuration aligns with your organization’s technical and business needs.

These concepts enable scalable, secure, and maintainable identity architectures. Whether you're supporting multiple brands, managing development lifecycles, or configuring app-specific flows, knowing how to work with Environments, Applications, and Clients is essential for effective implementation and governance.

Environments are isolated workspaces that support the full lifecycle of your identity experiences. Each environment — such as Development, Testing, or Production — operates independently, with its own end users, settings, and credentials.

Key benefits:

• Safe iteration: Test changes in lower environments without affecting production users.

• Controlled releases: Validate flows before deployment.

• Environment-specific configuration: Tailor credentials, integrations, and behavior as needed.

• Propagation of changes: Configure identity settings such as journeys, themes, and policies in a lower environment, then propagate those changes to upper environments once validated. This structured promotion ensures consistency, minimizes errors, and supports a clear release process.

Applications act as organizational units for clients across environments.

Key benefits:

• Multi-brand support: Manage several identities under one roof.

• Governance alignment: Reflect real-world org structures and allow access based on Application.

• Custom experiences: Apply tailored theming and journeys at the Application level.

Clients are the specific environment credentials within applications — web, mobile, single-page, or machine-to-machine — that integrate with Next Identity for authentication and authorization. Each Client is registered under an Application and configured per Environment, with unique credentials like Client ID and Secret (for confidential client types) per environment.

Key benefits:

• App-level control: Customize flows and policies per app.

• Security: Use environment-scoped credentials for safer integration.

• Flexibility: Support public or confidential architectures.

• A development team can test new login configurations in the Development Environment without affecting Production.

• A mobile app and a web app can be registered as separate Clients, each with its own branding and redirect URIs.

• Have multiple Environments (e.g., Dev, Staging, Prod) to support a healthy release pipeline.

• Register an Application for each unique purpose to keep flows, credentials, and security configurations isolated.

• Manage the Propagation Workflow

• Create a Client