Key Business Advantages of Alleviating the Identity Burden

Your teams are tasked with enabling world-class digital experiences that disrupt your industry or differentiate your business from its competition. However, this charter is becoming increasingly difficult as customer experience (CX) environments get more and more complex. Companies launch apps, acquire brands, expand to additional countries, and support more diverse devices and user types every day, although few are equipped to secure this complexity without introducing friction for their customers.

Although 86% of organizations expect the user experience (UX) to be their main competitive differentiator by 2021, only 40% currently have a customer identity initiative in place.¹ The virtual “front door” to your business, identity is the lynchpin for modern customer experiences like account registration, online shopping, and customer support. Yet, in the rush to get new apps out the door, many technology teams underestimate the demands of homegrown or code-heavy customer identity and access management (CIAM) solutions.

This is problematic because the threat landscape is constantly evolving, which leads to unpredictable vulnerabilities in your apps if you don’t keep up with security innovations. And the more digital services you offer to customers, the more necessary it becomes to provide a seamless experience with one set of credentials. Unfortunately, pro-code and all-code approaches divert your valuable development resources away from revenue-driving projects and instead keep them immersed in the identity business.

Top 3 requirements for business-enabling CIAM

Third-party platforms can relieve some of these pressures, but it’s important to realize that not all approaches to CIAM are created equal. The right solution turns identity into a business enabler, while the wrong choice introduces reliability, scalability, or security risks that can become a brand liability. With that in mind, there are three major questions every technology executive should ask themselves in order to evaluate whether their development team’s approach to