Identity and access management in the age of the customer

The ‘age of the customer’ is really the age of the internet, where customers have learned that they no longer need to settle. Instead, they can now go online to seek — and likely find — exactly what they are looking for, exactly when they want it. This unprecedented competitive pressure is driving the pace of business innovation faster than ever before.

Car companies are adding telemetric features, and retailers and service providers are dreaming up new perks and services to shore up loyalty. Banks too are scrambling over each other to offer the latest mobile app, and are looking more broadly at how technology can maximise client value and streamline operations.

But one huge hurdle in this headlong race to innovate is how to connect customer and citizen identities to these offerings. It is a paradox of openness and restriction. On the one hand, organisations need to provide easy, seamless access across platforms and services such as the cloud, mobile devices, customer portals, social platforms and the web. On the other hand, they must protect customer security and ensure that customers get exactly — and only — what they pay for. Businesses must reassess their approach to identity management in order to prosper in this new, fast-paced environment.

Traditional identity and access management (IAM) tools enable or deny access based on a few criteria, and only for a few thousand users — typically just employees and partners. Companies looking to support innovative services for customers can leverage identity relationship management (IRM) platforms instead. These can instantly support multiple devices, react to context and scale up to accommodate millions of users at a time — without any performance degradation or service disruption.

Today’s IRM can link devices and new mobile and social apps to a single security platform that enables identity synchronisation and single sign-on (SSO). But today’s SSO isn’t a simple yes/no. Multiple factors should determine whether or not a user gets access and, if so, how much and to what.

Contextual intelligence and awareness add value to digital services. For example, with the Toyota in-car portal, the system ‘knows’ which car and which driver is accessing the Toyota platform and where they are. This enables the system to recommend petrol stations, find a parking spot and offer real-time traffic information and automatic re-routing.

The winners and losers in today’s digital world will be determined by how they approach the issue of identity as they develop new offerings. Those that utilise the right identity platform can quickly respond to the needs of their business, reinventing themselves to roll out new services to any device or thing more quickly than their competitors — and to seize a distinct advantage in the market.

Sumal Karunanayake has worked in enterprise software since the 1990s. Prior to ForgeRock he spent five years at CA Technologies, where he led the market entry for Nimsoft and grew the business significantly prior to integrating Nimsoft into CA’s mainstream business. He was also a founding member of NetSuite internationally and ran EMEA Sales for NetSuite through its IPO.