Digital transformation is changing everything in the business world, from the way we communicate, to the way our factories operate, to how we define what and where the workplace is. It’s even making us reevaluate the ways in which we interact with our customers.
Many organizations are also rethinking customer interaction due to the growing list of data privacy laws. How customers are identified and how their data is stored has to be considered in new ways. These issues are just a few of the reasons why more companies are turning to cloud identity.
Cloud identity allows organizations to better manage their customers and users. It’s identity service and identity and access management (IAM) in a cloud computing environment. With digital transformation and many identity assets moving to the cloud, it’s necessary to not only protect the consumer, but also the business. With cloud identity, organizations can ensure that customer transactions are secure and not damaging to business operations.
Furthermore, in an environment where it is becoming harder to tell a real person from a bot, organizations need a way to discern legitimate transactions from spam, malware or trolls. In the digital business world, it is necessary to establish who is on the other end of these connections.
“If you are building a digital business, you have to establish a digital relationship,” explained John Summers, vice president at Akamai Technologies, during a conversation at the Edge World conference. “That’s where identity comes in.”
You likely do business digitally with your customers, and that business may be conducted across different websites, different login options, or even with different departments or entities within the same company. In the past, the problem has been that customers aren’t recognized as the same person across the entire business.
Plus, some sites don’t need to know the customer’s identity at all — in fact, the less a company knows about you, the better — but they still make customers sign in and create new authentication data. That’s an inconvenience to both the customer and the enterprise.
Through cloud identity, however, organizations can pick up identifiers that make it easier to recognize unique digital individuals.
