Taking a digital-first approach has allowed businesses to leapfrog the competition and disrupt markets, whether through big data insights and intelligence, top-line growth opportunities, or realizing bottom-line efficiencies. But new, innovative business models are having a profound impact on the Identity and Access Management (IAM) market and, for many, are forcing concessions regarding experience, security and process flow. Sadly, most IAM products are built to support specific business models and use cases and the good ones can only sway so far.
As the new head of product marketing for OpenText™ Covisint Identity and Access Management and OpenText™ Covisint Supplier Portal, I want to share five insights that can help keep your digital initiatives on track.
- New playing field: Much of the growth opportunity necessitates providing external users with access to internal systems – still somewhat of a rarity in IAM – and is driving new and expanded business models: B2B2C, B2C2B, B2x2x, etc. As such, it’s not surprising that IDC reports 70% of enterprises are “highly concerned” about the security of the data accessed by external partners.
- New challenges: Scale and availability are not simply by-words in the context of revenue-related business services that roll-up to a profit & loss statement. Enabling (and disabling) external user access as needed by each business can be tricky but is achievable, even in the absence of enterprise creature comforts such as in-person identity proofing, predictable organization structure, high-bandwidth pipes, etc.
- New users: In a digital world, anything can be connected – people, systems and things – and can have many different accounts. For example, the connected vehicle model has unique identities for drivers, on-board systems (e.g., infotainment), and physical sensors. An identity-centric approach is necessary to normalize and centralize access control and governance in the new frontier.
- New experiences: Even most InfoSec professionals concede that sensational customer experiences are becoming table stakes, and not just related to B2C. Businesses are investing in “make it easier to do business” initiatives to increase supplier and partner loyalty and quality.
- New purpose: Digital transformation shifted “Identity Management” to “Identity Relationship Management.” Understanding the total relationship between multiple identities can simplify and strengthen security, reduce sales cycles, and increase productivity. For example, continually tracking anonymous user behaviors can produce a rich history when correlated with a known identity; leveraging transitive relationships to adapt trust in real time reduces friction; auto-fill forms by aggregating data from multiple sources to minimize mundane effort, and so on.
Enabling businesses to thrive in a digitally-transformed world means embracing the challenges and risks posed by securing external and third-party entities and accommodating desired business processes without resorting to customized software or degraded customer experience.
Learn why OpenText’s outside-in approach to digital ecosystem management is equally effective for internal and external users by downloading the IDG report, External Digital Data: Essential for Business, a Challenge to Safeguard.
