Bring Secure, Frictionless Customer Experiences to Market Faster with Modern CIAM

The way organisations interact with customers has evolved dramatically over the years, and will continue to evolve. Websites used to be an organisation’s main interaction point where customers could read some basic, static information about the organisation’s business. The explosion of different devices and communication channels has changed all that. In today’s highly mobile world, 77% of U.S. adults own a smartphone and 53% own a tablet.1 In response to that, 73% of U.S. marketers indicate they’ve designed their websites specifically with smartphones in mind and 50% have designed their websites with tablets in mind.2 From the Internet of Things (IoT) to an array of other smart devices, customers also connect in a multitude of other ways to get access to digital services and consume dynamic content. And each time they connect, they expect a seamless, consistent experience regardless of the device or channel they use.

Customers also expect those experiences to be secure and private. The requirement for secure experiences has always been there for an organisation’s workforce, especially since it’s in the best interest of the organisation to safeguard its digital assets. But with all the different high-profile security and data breaches in the headlines, consumers’ demand for greater security and privacy in regards to protecting their personal information and digital experiences has risen above what some organisations might have provided their workforces only a few short years ago.

To meet the high expectations of today’s customers, reduce development time of digital experiences, and eliminate potential security gaps, organisations need to put their customers’ identity front and centre. A modern customer identity and access management (CIAM) solution can do just that.

Delivering on the Needs of CIAM

A modern CIAM solution, provides a digital identity layer that can be embedded into your customer-facing apps and portals. There are four main capability pillars that a modern CIAM solution needs to deliver on when it comes to addressing customer needs:

•Frictionless user experiences
•Speed-to-market
• Centralisation of access management
•Internet scale security

Frictionless User Experiences

To successfully engage your customers and provide them frictionless experiences across all their devices, you need to know and understand your customers. You also need to be able to protect any of their personally identifiable information (PII) that you might store. You can’t expect to keep customers for very long if their digital interactions with you are plagued with non-relevant content, inconsistent experiences, frustrating processes, or security concerns.

To be able to deliver frictionless customer experiences, you really need a 360-degree view of your customers as they come in from all your different channels. To make that happen you need a secure, scalable cloud repository designed specifically to store and manage all of your customer information. Additionally, whether you’re building out registration, login, or other common customer web-based workflows, you need to be able to customise those activities with your own branding, as well as with consistent interactions.

That’s why MGM Resorts chooses to not only use Okta as its identity standard for managing and securing its workforce of more than 70,000 people, but to also provide a consistent and seamless identity layer for its millions of customers too. MGM uses the Okta Universal Directory to securely store all of its customer data. Okta Single Sign-on enables MGM to ensure a customer only needs to sign in once to gain access to its mLife loyalty program and be seamlessly logged into all of the various resort properties. Additionally, as MGM builds out modern apps for customers' smartphones and in-room tablets at their hotels, they'll continue to ensure consistent, seamless identity experiences for its customers using Okta’s developer tools.

Speed-to-Market

As organisations build out new customer experiences, they want to bring those experiences to market fast. But if development teams have to build identity and security into those experiences from scratch, it  can considerably slow down their speed-to-market. Akin to an identity Swiss army knife, developers need an array of CIAM development tools that work across modern programming languages; tools they can pull off the shelf as needed, whether they’re building a web app, iOS app, or Android app. Developers also  need identity and security to be future-proofed against an ever-evolving landscape of requirements and attack vectors.

To help developers focus more on core application logic, gain greater development agility, and get to market faster, Okta provides these much needed array of identity tools by making it quick and easy for developers to integrate Okta identity and security capabilities. That includes robust APIs with easy to use SDKs and developer tool kits built on open standards that span a wide array of modern programming languages. Okta also provides extensive documentation, wizards, quick start guides, and API management integration. You can even add modern identity capabilities into an app in less than 15 minutes by simply putting a hosted customisable Okta widget in front of your apps and portals.

All of these different developer tools help free up your developers to focus more of their efforts on building the core services for your apps and other digital experiences. They no longer have to worry about designing and coding common hacker-proof workflows to handle registration, sign-in, account recovery, forgotten passwords, MFA enrollment, and more. Developers also no longer have to worry about keeping up with evolving identity and security needs. With the CIAM platform that enterp