How CIAM Solutions Help Protect Your Customers’ Data

Trust is the cornerstone of every successful relationship, and nowhere is it more pertinent than in the relationships you have with your customers. No matter where your customers interact with you — be it online, on a mobile app, or in person — they expect you to keep their data safe. Any security incident that compromises their personal information undermines the trust you have worked so hard to build, and could put your organisation in jeopardy. When companies offer fragmented identity management, they put themselves — and their customers — at risk of these costly breaches. That’s why Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) solutions are so essential to your business — centralised identity management ensures that your customers’ data remains secure and creates a cohesive customer experience across all aspects of your business.

What is a CIAM solution?

Security and usability are often seen to be at different ends of the user experience spectrum, but with strong CIAM solutions, this doesn’t have to be the case. CIAM solutions act as the virtual “front door”, keeping consumer data safe while facilitating easy access to websites or apps. CIAM solutions encompass both authentication and authorisation, as well as login experiences, user preferences, and user data across your applications and services. They do this through a number of features, including: 

Adaptive Multi-factor Authentication (Adaptive MFA)

Adaptive Multi-factor Authentication (Adaptive MFA) applies adaptive risk detection to the authentication process by examining the context of the authentication request and adding a strong security layer to your authentication flow. This CIAM feature helps you build extra protection into your products by allowing you to set policies and engage Multi-Factor Authentication based on user profile, resource, and risk score. With a range of modern verification factors, including SMS, Google Authenticator, and Okta Verify with Push, the system flexes according to different users' needs.

Social Authentication

Okta’s CIAM allows you to authenticate users from any social identity provider using social authentication. By giving your users the option to authenticate using their favourite social media platform, this feature can help you lower barriers to entry and boost registration rates. Okta's supported social providers can simplify complex integration requirements — or, if the need arises, you can choose to build your own standards-based connections.

Sign In with Okta takes this one step further by providing the painless user experience of social authentication with the rigid requirements of enterprise grade security to offer a seamless and secure business authentication experience. Using Sign In with Okta, organisations can provide their customers with a secure and delightful single sign-on (SSO) experience for any app or website.

Lifecycle Management

Managing user identities across a variety of different applications and services is a challenge at the best of times. However, if you are providing customers access, you need to ensure their experience is as painless as possible. Okta’s Lifecycle Management solution helps you meet this challenge by providing you with a single repository for user identity information, allowing companies to automate user provisioning and deprovisioning. This gives you the ability to create a consistent user experience (UX) across every part of your app landscape by giving you a secure platform to store profiles, manage passwords, and apply access policies.

Single Sign-On (SSO)

In addition to authentication and Universal Directory, Okta’s CIAM platform also provides Single Sign-On (SSO) capabilities, allowing users to access a set of applications with one username, one password, and one session. This feature not only improves the overall UX for your customers in an environment where they may need to log in to several apps, it also helps improve the reliability of your platform through pre-built integrations with other third-party services.

Okta’s CIAM: Security paired with usability

Okta’s secure CIAM solution helps you protect the trust your customers have placed in you while building a modern customer experience that will keep them happy with your service. The Okta platform delivers the industry’s most secure and reliable CIAM solution, which has been engineered to help you protect consumer accounts, engage more users, and subsequently drive more revenue for your business. 

Learn more about how CIAM solutions can help you provide streamlined, secure customer experiences.