Role of CIAM in digital transformation
Digital transformation has become the need of the hour for every consumer-focused business today
Digital transformation has become the need of the hour for every consumer-focused business today. Factors such as rapid innovations, data regulations, evolving consumer demands, higher consumer expectations of privacy and security have contributed significantly.
"Consumers today prefer to use a service (pay as you use) rather than own it (one-time purchase). So to retain existing consumers and attract new ones, businesses must continually evolve their service experience as the market evolves."
More so, Covid-19 has changed the way consumers interact with businesses. They demand exceptional consumer engagement and service from any device at any time with the highest levels of security and privacy.
According to IDC, digital transformation will reach nearly $2 trillion (about $6,200 per person in the U.S.)—a worldwide increase of 83 percent, by 2022.
However, digital transformation also translates into a lot of challenges that businesses face. The major ones include:
- Consumer experience at stake, 80 percent of businesses believe they deliver outstanding consumer experiences while only 8 percent of their consumers agree (source Bain & Company).
- Multiple disjointed identities, authentication, and access management systems.
- Disparate systems handling consumer data, leading to siloed or fragmented data.
- Inadequate protection of large-scale consumer data, leading to data breaches.
- More responsibility for businesses to manage data responsibly and meet compliance requirements.
- Multiple digital services to meet consumer needs, leading to the need to streamline and transform all services.
- Not enough developer resources to handle the transformation, resulting in delayed time-to-market.
The good news is that CIAM can help businesses overcome these digital transformation challenges.
Consumer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) allows businesses to securely authenticate their consumers and provide them frictionless access to digital resources. It covers customer experience, security, privacy, and analytics.
CIAM: Addressing challenges and helping with digital transformation
Consistent, seamless omnichannel experience for consumers
CIAM helps businesses provide a smooth authentication and access experience for their services. Businesses can choose the right form of authentication for their consumers ranging from password-based to passwordless logins, from biometric to device-based authentications.
Businesses should focus on strategies to minimize friction because unnecessary friction leads to consumer churn.
With single sign-on (SSO) via a CIAM, businesses can handle consumer log-ins to their various services through a single account. This reduces friction by eliminating the need for consumers to repeatedly log in to different services offered by the business. Example: If you are signed in to your Gmail account, you do not have to explicitly sign into the YouTube or Google Drive account in the same browser.
Unify fragmented consumer data
CIAM helps businesses connect consumer data points from all of their services into one account. This results in a unified view of consumer data, leaving no room for fragmented data or data silos. Businesses also gain a 360-degree view of the consumer, which is a crucial prerequisite for successful digital transformation.
Businesses can use this unified data to make better sales forecasting and marketing decisions. Insights into service usage and consumers help businesses better understand their consumers and service consumption.
Improve security and compliance
According to research, cyber attackers most often target personal information. They use this information to hijack consumer accounts or cause them logging issues.
Such incidents have a negative impact on business reputation. CIAM assists businesses in safeguarding their consumer data privacy, which can be otherwise complex and challenging to achieve during digital transformation.
The security features such as multi-factor authentication, risk-based authentication, data encryption (in-rest and in-transit), and protection against brute force attacks also play a significant role in improving the security aspect of consumer data and authentication.
Credentials stuffing has become a major threat to businesses in protecting consumer accounts. MFA and brute force protection together work as a shield against credential stuffing; MFA does not let attackers into the consumer account even if the primary credentials have been stolen and the brute force process does not let attackers make continuous repeated attempts.
Empowered developer support
CIAM supports developers of businesses; they do not have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to providing a secure and optimal consumer experience around authentication, authorization, and user management, and can instead focus on building or transforming the features that differentiate their app.
CIAMs have become a flexible developer platform, which enables fast speed-to-market and helps meet consumer needs. That’s not all, CIAM comes with the following for the outstanding developer experience and support:
- APIs documents with sample codes
- Language-based getting started and SDKs guides
- Third-party integrations and event-based data processing
- Customizable user interfaces
- Personalizable feature workflows
Scalability to keep pace
Scalability is a unique feature of CIAM, businesses need not worry about optimization or scaling as the number of consumers for their services grows. An appropriate CIAM can handle millions of consumer authentications and data. Sometimes the scalability requirements are specific to some business events, even CIAM can easily handle such requirements and provides event-based support.
So, whether it is the changing requirements or new technology trends, CIAM partners can help businesses on another level.
Deals with complexity across devices
Consumers use various devices such as mobile phones, tablets, laptops, IoT, smart TVs, smartwatches, etc. Handling authentication and authorization processes around all these devices with the parameters of security, consumer experience, and seamlessness can be time-consuming for developers. CIAM brings all this and developers only need to use it for their services.
Compliant with data regulations
Data regulations and privacy laws require businesses to collect, store and process consumer data within the guidelines. CIAM already complies with these data regulations such as GDPR, CCPA makes it smoother for businesses.
Besides, CIAM offers centralized consumer data management and consent management as core capabilities, which are the crucial requirements of key data regulations.
Driven benefits of using CIAM in digital transformation
- Improve consumer satisfaction (CSAT) and engagement
- Modernize legacy systems by bringing them to the cloud
- Maintain competitiveness
- Get insights for informed decision making
- Expedite new consumer experiences
- Boost developer productivity
- All these factors result in increased revenue for businesses.
Undoubtedly, CIAM proves to be the right partner for businesses that are planning to digitally transform their services.
Originally published at ITProPortal
Deepak Gupta