Digital Transformation is being driven by a desire for improved user experience. David Hope, Senior Vice President, Asia Pacific and Japan, ForgeRock, discusses the practical and cybersecurity challenges this raises, as well as solutions to tackle them.
The past two years have greatly accelerated Digital Transformation as businesses and individuals have embraced the online world. Beyond necessity, the digitization of goods and services has changed the way we shop, work, live and play.
The increasing ease enabled by Digital Transformation is symbolic of a new era – the ‘Age of Experience.’ As businesses continue to leverage digital tools, services and opportunities, there is a greater ability to offer experiences defined by effortlessness.
The Age of Experience will be defined by simple principles like ease of use and lack of friction. The reality is that a majority of this transformation is enabled by digital Identity Access Management (IAM) solutions. We’re witnessing a rise in IAM spending, with Gartner predicting the global market to reach US$276.3 billion, growing by 11% annually from 2022 to 2026.
In addition, a large component of this effortlessness is underpinned by seamless access to services across different devices. The correct Zero Trust architecture, which mandates that all users, whether inside or outside the organisation’s network, be continually authenticated and authorised, is what ultimately determines how easily users can access services from a variety of devices like phones and laptops.
Given customer expectations are rising around what constitutes experience, businesses that leverage these tools to provide greater and safer ease of use are likely to create a better experience for users.
How IAM underpins user experience
Looking back, we can see just how quickly the customer experience and journey have evolved. From walking through brick-and-mortar stores to browsing online shopping sites, the experience is different and customer expectations have grown rapidly alongside this.
As changing customer habits boost hybrid experiences, often across multiple devices, customers are looking for a seamless approach. They want a high standard of personalization alongside a secure offering – which can be made possible with IAM. The ability to access an account with biometric authentication and passwordless solutions means less time dealing with forgotten password resets and more time online.
In fact, a recent survey found that one-third of consumers surveyed would cancel their account if they came across a difficult log-in process, which means that businesses must invest in ways to minimize friction to maintain revenue and customer interest. Single-Sign-on (SSO), for example, saves users time and improves efficiency, simplifying the process for users, building loyalty and increasing personalization.
With increasing scrutiny and expectations around privacy and data collection, putting users at the centre of their own data journey can help users feel safe and secure about their information and using IAM to minimize friction will aid in bolstering user experience among fierce competition.
Using AI to build security
Businesses will continue to be judged on their user experience as digital interactions rise. As a result, organisations are under increasing pressure to ensure that their services are not only seamless but also secure.
The reality is that the traditional password and username approach is no longer safe. The 2022 ForgeRock Consumer Identity Breach Report found that 2 billion data records containing usernames and passwords were compromised in 2021, a 35% increase over 2021.
This tells us we need a better solution and that IAM is the foundation on which seamless and safe experiences are built. Implementation of Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) and Zero Trust architecture ensures users experience a high level of security, significantly mitigating risk and reducing opportunities for malicious actors.
When it comes to security, AI is an integral piece of the puzzle for elevating traditional digital identity solutions. AI enables greater processing of all the signals associated with a user’s digital identity to either give them seamless access, intervene with stepped-up authentication when unsure of the user’s identity, or block them when they are fraudulent. It also stops malicious actors at a massive scale.
In the workforce, for example, organisations that use traditional role-based access control approaches to simplify the process of managing user identities and workforce access permissions face difficulty as a fluid workforce becomes more common, increasing manual labour and struggling to target bad actors. But AI-driven systems that leverage Machine Learning to discover role-based access patterns can help increase seamlessness while accessing and blocking criminal behaviour.
With AI generating stronger and safer outcomes, IAM offers organisations of all sizes the ability to move lightyears ahead of the crowd, leaning into the Age of Experience.
Conclusion
The world of user experience is changing. From hybrid to multiplatform, consumers and customers are demanding and expecting more for businesses when it comes to both experience and security.
As we move further into the Age of Experience, businesses will come to invest more in IAM solutions to build a solid foundation for innovation fuelled by identity management.
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