Everyone's and identity driven company (even if you aren't one)
What does it mean if everyone’s an identity driven company? Before answering that question, let’s define what it means to be an identity-driven company.
Identity remains the answer to the basic questions: Who are we? Why are we here? What drives us different from others?
But, what’s digital identity? Many people have used this term to relate to core IT services such as access controls, password resets, user directories, and authentication. Identity, on the other hand, is much more than that today.
It has truly become the digital economy's connective tissue. Thanks to the emergence of consumer identity and access management, users can now interface with businesses, technology, and consumers in the most personalized and efficient way possible by providing reliable access and protection across APIs, new sensors and devices (IoT), and intelligent machines.
The Current Competitive Landscape
A landscape has emerged in the past decade, and companies are having to make contingency plans for these changes. In this new landscape, companies not only have to keep up with current business, but also are working to understand a new way of thinking about their customers' identities and behaviors.
Companies need to be able to rapidly develop solutions and infrastructure to explore a problem space, then quickly ramp up if the opportunity turns out to be significant. In making this shift, companies need to consider many factors in addition to simply the technology that's available.
Protect Your Business Data On The Internet
Consumer identity is one of the most important factors in brand building, and it’s a major reason why there are so many identity-driven companies. Part of what makes such companies so successful is their constant attention to customer needs. It’s now more important than ever for companies to understand how consumer identities shape their decision-making processes.
It's not a secret that data is the most valuable asset of modern organizations. Protecting it is critical, particularly as it moves across an organization's infrastructure, applications, and people.
One thing that's often overlooked in this respect is identity management. Small-scale hacks and data breaches are becoming more common every year, and we've seen that there isn't always a clear understanding of how to protect against them. When it comes to protecting information online, many businesses believe that if they're not storing a ton of sensitive information on their servers, they don't have a problem at all. In reality, though, identity management is crucial in protecting yourself against identity theft and other risks related to personal information sharing.
How Important Is Security In An Identity-Driven Company?
Securing your consumer identity is crucial. After all, it is the identities that establish a baseline for which you can employ identity management solutions and offer them the correct level of access to your products and services. With appropriate identity management solutions, integration of user identities, role-based access, authorization, and privilege management, you can reduce the number of accounts in need of password resets.
As customer identity and access management (CIAM) has progressed, the focus of its early days has changed. In the beginning, companies focused on the client's identity. However, with the emergence of cloud computing, companies turned their attention to the customer's identity and driving cloud computing adoption. Nowadays, companies recognize that consumers' identity and security are both important elements to consider in CIAM implementations.
Why Is CIAM So Important?
Retaining customers is key to any consumer-oriented organization. So, the question is how can a consumer identity management system help an organization retain its customers?
One of the main strategies is to create personalized experiences. Ideally, organizations want customers to feel like they are always being taken care of and that they matter. Thus, if a company succeeds in creating personalized experiences for their customers, then they are likely to retain more of their customers.
That’s where the role of customer identity and access management comes into play. It helps organizations manage identities and access rights for customers, employees, and partners.
The benefits of CIAM include:
- Improved customer experience by providing a secure and compliant environment for users.
- Reduced security risks by automating identity management processes.
- Increased efficiency by streamlining the authorization and compliance process.
Just like CIAM being an important factor, SSO is another business-critical solution that provides greater security and compliance.
What About Single Sign-On?
Authenticating multiple applications with a single set of credentials — that’s single sign-on. SSO has become an important identity management keystone of the consumer web, along with mobile identity applications, banks, and government agencies are also using federated identity systems. Some benefits include:
- Reduced security risks. With a single credential, users are less likely to enter incorrect passwords into different sites.
- Reduced IT costs. SSO can help reduce the number of password changes required by consumers, as well as the time spent managing those changes.
Conclusion
Consumer identity is the reason your company or brand exists. Whether you’re a startup or a long-established business, identity-driven marketing is critical to your success.
Identifying and focusing on your business's consumer identity is a great way to ensure that you stand out in the marketplace. To some people, this might seem like an unnecessary step—but it is actually a vital one.
Being identity-driven means that you focus on the things that make you different from your competition, and use this differentiation to attract and retain customers. By doing this, you can ensure that your business remains successful over the long term.
Originally Published at ValueWalk
Deepak Gupta