The Future of CIAM: 4 Trends Shaping Identity and Access Management

Balancing usability and security

Life moves fast—but we all know that technology moves even faster. The solutions we used a year ago won’t necessarily work today, at least not in their original form. At the same time, customer expectations are more refined than ever before, with many accustomed to the seamless digital experiences from leaders such as Amazon, Apple, and Netflix.

But it’s not just how someone engages with a platform that matters. Today’s consumers also expect companies to protect their personal information—in a way that doesn’t disrupt how they use an application or service. It’s no longer enough for businesses to authenticate customers with just a username and password. They have to stay ahead of the curve, employ the latest digital technologies, and create experiences that are as secure as they are enjoyable.

Complex identities need complex solutions

To paint a picture of the complex customer identity needs that businesses should account for, let’s take a look at how a retailer might interact with its customers.

Imagine a company creates an app that allows customers to browse and purchase goods online. It needs to quickly build relationships with unknown users that have never interacted with the brand and allow them to browse for products and request alerts, then prompt them to register.
At this point, the business will start collecting user consent to gather their personal information and send them marketing emails and partner promotions. It also needs to store that data securely and ensure that all data use complies with relevant privacy regulations.
When the user is ready to purchase a product, the app should be able to authenticate them and collect any additional necessary profile information, enabling the user to quickly and securely create an account.
As the user traverses both digital and physical experiences, their journey needs to be personalised and localized via tight integrations with the company’s marketing technology stack.
As the business grows and becomes increasingly complex, it requires an identity platform that can span all of this, grow with it, and adapt to its unique challenges along the way. And, of course, continue to offer a seamless experience to its users.

Having a robust, modern customer identity and access management (CIAM) architecture in place helps businesses do more than deliver seamless experiences to customers. It can also help them succeed in their digital transformation initiatives, and differentiate themselves in their respective industries. With that in mind, here are four trends that are shaping the future of CIAM, and the solutions you need to capitalize on them.

Trend 1: Driving customer engagement

Customer-facing organizations are under constant pressure to innovate and enhance how users interact with their brand. It makes sense, then, that one of the biggest trends shaping the future of CIAM is improved customer engagement and lowered time to value. Ultimately, if you’re building a product, you want users to engage with that product—and delivering a superior experience is vital to fostering those relationships. But of course, all brands are built on trust, which can only be gained over time.

One of the best ways to build trust is to ask for user information progressively, and to introduce only minimal friction when absolutely necessary. The user registration process, for example, can create a choke point where businesses lose potential customers. If it occurs too early, the user might be turned off from further exploring your site. And if it occurs too late, you risk missing the opportunity of actively engaging that user. By providing the right prompts and content at the right time—to the right people—businesses can solidify their connections with users.

It’s also important to provide a consistent look and feel across all touchpoints, regardless of the number of brands you operate or where they are located, and to speak the user’s language.

How Okta can help

There are four things that Okta is doing to help businesses develop seamless, powerful CIAM experiences and get them to market as quickly as possible:

Maintain a consistent brand experience: With Okta, organizations can embed their brand assets into every step of the identity journey, and update branding using developer tools and APIs.
Create custom out-of-band factor experiences: Our Devices SDK allows you to create passwordless experiences for users. Custom biometric, time- based one-time passwords, and push notification methods can be used to authenticate users within an organization’s native mobile applications.
Speak to customers in their language: Okta’s “Bring Your Own Language” translation platform ensures you can speak to customers in their native tongues and effectively account for regional nuances (e.g., Québécois vs. Parisian French, American vs. Canadian English) or new languages.
Build a user’s profile over time. Okta’s capabilities in progressive profiling and social account linking can support businesses in obtaining customer data at the precise point in the customer journey that it is needed.

Creating a valuable and enjoyable experience is one of the quickest ways to drive customer engagement— and we all know that highly engaged users are likely to purchase more products, more frequently.

Trend 2: Delivering better security outcomes

Many businesses believe that good security is achieved by deploying multi-factor authentication (MFA) and adaptive policies on their apps. But that approach alone isn’t sufficient when customers have the ultimate choice over whether or not they use MFA.

Instead, businesses can drive better outcomes—for themselves and their customers—by empowering users to keep their data secure at a level they are comfortable with, and by adding security controls that do not require direct customer input. Therefore, rather than implementing the highest, most disruptive security options, you should focus on applying the right security at the right time, providing flexible policies, and keeping things simple where possible.

Think back to the example at the beginning of this whitepaper. If that business had chosen to introduce strict security measures during a time when customers were simply browsing for products, it would have likely lost a large percentage of users before they ever transacted. A better approach for the future is to have multiple customer access and authentication policies in place—apps that only allow customers to check the status of an order, for example, require a different level of security than apps that allow customers to register and make a purchase.

How Okta can help

Considering how much—and frequently—security shifts in the customer landscape, we’re working on providing businesses with