Overcoming Six Key Obstacles in the Administration of Client Identity Information by IT Departments
In today's digital age, managing customer identities effectively is crucial for businesses aiming to maintain security, ensure compliance, and optimize user experiences. According to Richard Lack, Director of Sales, EMEA, Gigya, a specialized, cloud-based system for managing consumer identities can offer a more efficient and secure solution compared to building a custom Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) solution for large-scale enterprises.
The Challenges of Managing Customer Identities
Managing customer identities presents several key challenges. Cybercriminals exploit stolen credentials via phishing, credential stuffing, and insider threats, causing data breaches and regulatory risks. Ensuring compliance with regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, SOX, and DORA is another complex task, especially in hybrid infrastructures and decentralized workforces.
Identity sprawl and siloed ownership, where different teams manage identities separately, lead to inconsistent lifecycle events and orphaned records, causing poor data quality and broken access policies. Balancing security with user experience is also a significant challenge, as overly complex authentication can frustrate users and lead to workarounds that undermine security. Managing both human and machine identities effectively is another hurdle, as machine identities are rapidly created by automation tools and can be hard to track or control.
Addressing the Challenges
Effective approaches to address these challenges include automation and continuous governance, cross-functional collaboration and clear ownership, adoption of modern IAM/IGA solutions, balancing user experience and security, visibility and monitoring of machine identities, and ensuring privacy compliance.
Automation and Continuous Governance
Automating identity lifecycle management, especially for machine identities, can help keep pace with dynamic workflows, enforce least privilege, and conduct routine access reviews.
Cross-Functional Collaboration and Clear Ownership
Establishing dedicated ownership and coordinated governance across HR, IT, security, and compliance teams can eliminate silos and ensure consistent identity data and policies.
Adoption of Modern Identity and Access Management Solutions
Implementing CIAM and IGA platforms that support privacy compliance, seamless integration with modern protocols, granular access control, and scalable policy enforcement can help businesses manage customer identities effectively.
Balancing User Experience and Security
Using adaptive authentication, risk-based access controls, and single sign-on (SSO) can simplify user access while maintaining robust security.
Visibility and Monitoring of Machine Identities
Using specialized tools to discover, track, and audit machine credentials embedded in code and automation pipelines can mitigate hidden risks.
Privacy Compliance
Ensuring personally identifiable information (PII) is encrypted at rest, in use, and in motion, passwords are hashed, and two-factor authentication is in place for end-users is essential for privacy compliance.
The Role of CIAM in Business Growth
According to a Gartner report, IT is transforming into a driver of new growth initiatives. To optimize omni-channel marketing, sales, and service initiatives, businesses must ensure that a wide variety of customer data from all sources is managed properly and made actionable. Specialised CIAM providers offer a better performing, more scalable, flexible, and secure system for managing consumer identities and driving superior customer experiences.
Scalability is another challenge, as customer identities are often measured in the millions, requiring no compromise in performance at any time for any layer in the identity stack. Authentication and authorization standards like SAML and OAuth should be used to secure high-volume API transactions. Web and mobile APIs are the backbone of digital business, but legacy IAM solutions struggle to manage consumer data.
In summary, managing customer identities effectively requires a holistic approach combining technology—especially automation and modern IAM/IGA tools—with organizational alignment and policy enforcement to reduce security risks, ensure compliance, and enhance user experience across human and machine identities.
The role of technology in addressing the challenges of managing customer identities can be significant. For instance, implementing modern Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) solutions can help businesses manage customer identities effectively, ensuring both security and compliance.
In the pursuit of business growth, specialized CIAM providers offer a more scalable, flexible, and secure system for managing consumer identities, enabling superior customer experiences and optimizing omni-channel marketing, sales, and service initiatives. These solutions are essential for handling high volumes of customer identities, thus ensuring scalability without compromising performance at any layer in the identity stack.
