One-Minute Webinar: Top Trends in CIAM

We recently delivered a webinar featuring Gartner research on the latest trends impacting customer identity and access management (CIAM). Gartner’s Research Vice President Mary Ruddy presented findings from her March 2018 research, Top 5 Trends in CIAM Solution Design. Discussion in the webinar included the challenges organizations face in keeping their customers happy—both in terms of offering seamless experiences across devices and securing personal information.

Don’t have time to tune in? We’ll walk you through some of Gartner’s insights from their report and Okta’s main takeaways.

Here’s what Gartner found

• CIAM capabilities have become mainstream. Over 69% of respondents to a Gartner IAM survey are using—or are planning to use—various IAM technologies for B2C constituencies by end of 2018.
• Security architecture must underpin all CIAM initiatives. Good security is key to protecting consumers’ information and to maintaining their trust. As consumers increasingly conduct high-value, sensitive transactions digitally, it is imperative for organizations to protect their businesses from threats to consumer-facing channels. Highly publicized breaches of consumer information also have made online identity proofing more challenging.
• Privacy and compliance capabilities are foundational. Although workforce IAM initiatives are primarily concerned with protecting business assets, CIAM initiatives focus on protecting the individual. CIAM teams must adhere to an increasing number of consumer protection laws and regulations. For example, GDPR is top of mind for organizations based in the EU or that collect and hold data on people in the EU.
• Overlap between CIAM and other IAM deployments continue to grow. Implementations that serve multiple user constituencies are becoming common—for example, both B2C and B2B, or the IoT and B2C on the same CIAM platform.
• Developers are becoming more important to CIAM. They are increasingly likely to be interacting directly with the CIAM system. Therefore, there has been an increase in IT and developer input to the CIAM purchase decision.

Okta’s take on these insights

• Friction is the enemy of satisfying user experiences. Companies need to prioritize seamless authentication and authorization that make it easy for customers to gain access to the apps and information they need, while still keeping data secure. This means adopting a customer identity solution that eliminates the frustrations that come with juggling credentials.
• Passwords alone cannot protect customer data in an age of evolving security threats. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) can not only help prevent account takeovers, but also reduce login friction. Traditional MFA can be perceived as inconvenient by users, but this is why adaptive authentication with login context is ideal—it can secure data while providing the smoothest-possible login experience for end users. This also paves the way for passwordless experiences.
• Centralizing user data gives organizations a clear, organized view of customers’ profiles. This allows companies to offer better customer experiences, improve security, and reduce IT and developer workload by providing a single source of truth for all users.
• Building on top of a single identity platform for all of an organization’s end-users (customers, partners, and employees) provides better IT efficiency, agility, and security. Profile information—like a patient’s healthcare record—needs to be accessed by doctors, staff, insurance specialists, and the patients themselves.
• Companies can increase developer efficiency and increase speed to market by empowering developers with tools to design services that customers want—in their programming language of choice—without relinquishing creative control.

How Okta can help

• Okta’s Customer Identity (CIAM) solution enables organizations to transform their customer experiences with a digital identity layer that provides frictionless experiences, speed-to-market, centralized administration, and internet-scale security.
• Okta API Products gives developers the toolkits, documentation, and reusable components they need to add authentication, authorization, and user management to apps without the hassle of building these functionalities from scratch.
• We’re helping our customers finally say goodbye to passwords and move towards passwordless authentication, providing a seamless end-user experience while maintaining the utmost security.

For more insights, check out our whitepaper, Bring Secure, Frictionless Customer Experiences to Market Faster with Modern CIAM.