Two Sides of Identity Management: Corporate and Consumer

Online identity is emerging as a major theme with increased cloud adoption in business. In his piece after last week’s Montgomery & Co. investor conference, New York Times reporter Quentin Hardy explores identity management from both the corporate and consumer perspectives.

Corporate: Hardy identifies a few of the primary drives toward identity management in the enterprise as the increasing diversity among devices (fixed and mobile) and increasing partnerships in the cloud.

He writes:

“As cloud-based networks explode, there is a lot of money in keeping straight all those corporate passwords, figuring out whether a browser belongs to an authorized business partner, a trusted employee, or a new customer. “

Consumer: On the consumer side, social login has predominance as an identity management solution. With consumers averaging 28 website logins, social login is an easy way to verify identity.

For both corporate and consumer companies, identity management for end users is critical in an increasingly cloud networked environment.

Search for New Business Models Driving Enterprise Cloud Adoption

In a recent study, IBM showed that the number of enterprises using cloud computing will double by 2015. What’s particularly interesting about this data is not just the sheer number of organizations turning to the cloud, but for what purpose. Thirty-five percent of the executives surveyed for the study answered that they will be adopting cloud solutions to transform their business models.

Darryl Taft for eWeek points out that cloud adoption is moving beyond the realm of pure IT motivation and becoming a critical component of business strategy. For example, in the IBM study 62 percent of respondents pointed to third party collaboration as a key objective in moving to the cloud, and an important part of their business goals.

Check out a case study we released last week with Canadian shipping giant Purolator that shows how Okta helped extend the cloud to Purolator’s customer, Xerox, through a customer portal.