3 ways identity helps retailers maintain privacy & compliance
Okta, November 16, 2022
Big data is a hot commodity in the modern retail world. By harnessing key insights on buying behaviours, geographical locations, product preferences, and more, organisations can deliver the streamlined and highly personalised shopping experiences that delight customers, increase differentiation, and drive sales in both the long-term and the short.
Yet, despite its benefits, managing customer data in accordance with increasingly stringent data privacy regulations (i.e., General Data Protection Regulation,
California Consumer Privacy Act) creates many new challenges and risks for retailers in the digital age. Alongside crippling fines, non-compliance can cause irreparable damage to a brand’s reputation and drive once loyal customers into the arms of the nearest competitor.
In this post, we explore three ways an identity and access management platform like Okta can help alleviate data privacy and compliance pains to accelerate growth and secure trust with every interaction.
#1 Strengthens security at the identity layer
Data breaches are on the rise and are costing organisations billions in financial losses and reputational damages every year. While there are many ways to infiltrate an IT network, reports show that 61% of all breaches involve lost or stolen credentials – making the identity layer a primary target for bad actors to attack. To stop cybercriminals at their source and ensure organisations can securely store and manage data compliantly, many retailers are turning to modern identity and access management for a solution.
By replacing traditional usernames and passwords with one secure, centralised credential for every user account, retailers are able to eliminate the risks of phishing and other credential-based attacks to ensure customer data remains secure. The inclusion of multi-factor authentication (MFA) adds further reinforcement to the identity layer by securely verifying every login attempt, irrespective of device or location.
#2 Simplifies consent management
While the pressure to comply with data privacy and compliance regulations grows stronger by the day, retailers must also focus on fulfilling their mandates and generating revenue. To achieve this, they need to deliver the seamless, personalised customer experiences that breed loyalty and drive sales. For many retailers, this means harnessing customer data to make personalised recommendations and provide tailored user experiences.
To maintain trust and remain compliant, however, companies must first get consent from their customers on how their data will be used. To make this process as unobtrusive and effective as possible, Okta provides a variety of innovative identity solutions. As well as automatically sharing policies and notices, we empower our customers to actively manage, and monitor user preferences and conduct automated consent requests without impacting the user experience.
#3 Enables robust real-time compliance reporting
Preparing for a compliance audit can be a major headache. As well as being a huge drain on time and resources, manually logging data across multiple cloud and legacy IT systems significantly increases the risk of human error, which makes collecting evidence on-demand even more challenging. Aside from incurring huge fines and penalties through non-compliance, failing to pass an audit can have a disastrous impact on customer trust and slows down productivity across the board.
By bridging the gap between legacy and cloud directory user data and automating the data logging process with lifecycle management, Okta helps simplify and accelerate the auditing process tenfold. From a security standpoint, IT can troubleshoot and address any high-risk issues immediately with a syslog that captures all activity in real time. Okta also has a curated list of pre-built reports that help admins detect potential security risks and better understand how end users consume apps and services.
How Okta can help
Okta’s position as world leader in Identity Access Management is confirmed by more than 15,000 satisfied customers across the globe. Every day, our innovative market-leading identity products help organisations like GymShark harness the true value of their data to deliver the seamless and secure digital experiences that drive success. As well as enabling rapid growth, we help ease the pains of data privacy and compliance so organisations can focus on building trust and delivering better digital services to their customers.
To learn more about how Okta can help simplify data privacy and compliance at your organisation, and to reveal why we’ve been named a Customers’ Choice in the 2022 Gartner® Peer Insights™ “Voice of the Customer” report for Access Management (AM) four times in a row, contact one of our friendly experts for a quick chat at whatever time is most convenient.