Why You Need to Consider Identity and Access Management When Defining Your Digital Transformation Strategy
Overview
Your Identity and Access Management (IAM) strategy plays a key role in determining your digital transformation strategy. When evaluating business processes, the security of those new processes must be considered. While it is necessary to implement strong security practices, consideration of usability and ease-of-use needs to be factored into the design. This article will outline ways in which you can incorporate Identity and Access Management processes into your digital transformation strategy.
What is Digital Transformation
Digital transformation is a re-engineering of your business processes to take advantage of modern technologies. It is not just a matter of just taking a process and making it digital, but also a review and examination of how your business is done and how it can be made better. The key to digital transformation is that it is about the customer at its core. New technologies and processes can be used to define new ways to do business.
Digital transformation goes beyond a single organization. New processes need to cross the historic corporate silos, allowing you to define processes that bring together marketing, sales and services in how you engage your customers. These new processes can deliver a significant competitive advantage over companies that continue with legacy processes.
While it is easy to think of a customer as someone who buys your goods and services, it is important to keep in mind that employees are customers as well. Employees have embraced the modern age and expect to be able to interact with their employers in a truly connected fashion. This “always on” environment must be considered as you look to define your digital transformation strategy.
How Does Identity and Access Management Play a Role
Identity and Access Management plays a key role in your digital transformation strategy. It contains the underlying processes that manage identities across your corporate systems and provides the front door to access those systems. IAM technologies must be reviewed and part of your digital transformation analysis. Inclusion of your security organization as part of the process is a necessity.
Remember that when reviewing your IAM strategy, both customers and employees are a direct consideration. Customer behavior begins with how you manage that customer’s identity and how you determine that customer’s identity when interacting with your systems. Employees need access to that information in a secure and easy to use fashion. Overly complex authentication processes, while perhaps highly secure, have a negative impact on user experience. The use of manual or complicated identity management processes will only result in poorly managed identities. This makes it challenging to ensure correct system access, define the processes around managing that access, and certifying the identities for compliance purposes.
Your IAM digital transformation strategy is your first step into gaining visibility into the complete view of customer behavior. You must securely identify the user before you can allow access and can determine the identity of the user. Additionally, security behaviors can inform your decisions based upon where customers are logging-in, how customers prefer to authenticate, what systems the users are accessing, or even when users are using your resources. This information can help not only your security practices to identify potential security breaches, but also these behaviors can be shared with other teams to determine how to best serve customers and market additional services to those users.
Identity and Access Management Key Factors
When starting your reimagining of your Identity and Access Management processes, your main consideration is how you can personalize the experience of your customer interactions. While this is not solely the purview of your IAM systems, this experience begins with those systems and is a factor with every click the user makes. The ability to ensure the usability of those processes, the ability to build an interface that best suits your customer’s needs, and the information you gain from those clicks are all factors that need to be considered.
Engaging customers where they are leveraging new technologies is at the core of digital transformation. While something as simple as social sign-in seems minor, acknowledging that user behavior is driven by common online interactions simplifies the user experience. However, as part of that analysis, the level of security required must be considered. Perhaps signing-in with an Apple ID is sufficient when the user is accessing the system from a known location, but if the user is signing-in from a new location or performing a sensitive transaction an additional factor to identity the user is required. These authentication policies are an example of ways to engage your customer that simplify the user experience. Additionally, single sign-on ensures that the user is not prompted multiple times, reducing user dissatisfaction, and better secures the environment as the user crosses system and application components.
In order to provide a unified customer experience, it is necessary to enhance user profiles for better personalization. Data regarding the user may exist in multiple systems. Bringing those attributes together allows you to enrich that profile to provide a better customer experience. Technologies like a Federated Identity Service allow you unify what you know about the customer without needing to have each system connect to multiple backends to get that data. As an identity integration layer, these services allow you to better unify identity information, improve security, create custom views into identity attributes, and even persist data locally as needed. This integration layer speeds deployments and simplifies the integration across systems. This puts the customer at the core by bringing together all that you know about that users, and also centralizes the access to user information which can be used to determine user behavior. This improves your ability to scale your systems and also future-proof your security infrastructure.
Other ways to speed the deployment of your IAM digital transformation is to leverage cloud based services for your identity infrastructure. There are several considerations in leveraging a cloud based service. The primary consideration is how much control you need over your user identities. For highly secure environments, hosting those identities offsite may not be possible. Another consideration is how many applications you have are cloud based or have a mechanism for federated sign-in with technologies like SAML. If you have a high number of on-premises applications, a cloud based identity service may not be as relevant a choice. However, keep in mind that one of the main drivers for digital transformation is to review those applications and to determine if those applications can be modernized. Even factors such as if you are securing customer facing or employee facing systems need to be considered. The licensing costs for large customer facing systems may make some cloud based services untenable.
Developing a strategy for delivering your IAM components as microservices also speeds your time to market. This allows you to externalize security from the applications and centralize the management of security policy without the need to deliver monolithic legacy technologies. Microservices allow applications to be created using a collection of loosely coupled services. The services are fine-grained and lightweight. This improves modularity and enables flexibility during the development phase of the application, making the application easier to understand. When designing applications, identity becomes a key factor to building out a personalized user experience. Identity also enables other microservices for tasks like authorization, single sign-on, identity management and compliance. These microservices can then be leveraged to engage the customer on the platform of their choice. Whether it is a mobile application or a website, a common personalized experience can be delivered.
Embracing DevOps practices can also modernize your Identity and Access Management infrastructure and processes. DevOps combines your IAM processes and technologies with your IT operations. This can help shorten your release cycles and improve the quality of your systems. Leveraging an agile approach to your releases brings incremental successes and eliminates the historic “big-bang” approach to delivering IAM technologies. Technologies like Kubernetes for orchestration help automate the deployment, scaling and management of your IAM infrastructure. When built with microservices in mind, individual components of your IAM infrastructure can be enhanced and delivered in an automated fashion without the risk of impacting your entire IAM environment.
Embracing new technologies around Artificial Intelligence (AI) should also be part of your IAM digital transformation strategy. AI allows you to gain insights into user behavior that may not be otherwise possible. This improves your ability to provide a more secure environment and to better detect breaches. It also provides insights into user behavior that can drive marketing and sales campaigns.
Remember that your customers includes your employees. When defining your IAM digital transformation strategy, consider technologies that improve the user experience, expand access to modern technologies and allow users to leveraging the devices of their choice. This requires evaluation and implementation of the same principles that were leveraged for external customers. Look at simplifying the security interactions through authentication policies, easy to use multi-factor authentication (MFA), single sign-on, and access to collaboration technologies that can be leveraged in a secure manner. Look at zero-trust network principles by using technology to determine the level of confidence you have in systems connected to your network and the behavior of your internal users.
Example Implementation
The principles of Identity and Access Management as part of digital transformation can be highlighted by the example of a large bank in New York. This bank was looking to provide a better customer experience and to improve the overall security of their systems. Their goals included delivering a new online customer banking experience, learning more about their customers, and leveraging targeted marketing to up-sell banking services in a personalized manner. Additionally, this included the delivery of new mobile based banking tools to better engage their customers.
This bank delivered a system that combined a platform for online and mobile banking with Identity and Access Management tools needed to secure and personalize the user experience. By leveraging technologies that were tightly integrated, the bank was able to engage with the user on the platform of their choice. This also allowed the bank to get a full view of the users’ activities and deliver marketing during the sign-in flow. This marketing was specific to the users profile which was unified through a federated identity service. The process of “knowing your customer” (KYC) helped to ensure that the user was correctly identified from initial registration through to performing secured interactions.
The bank also delivered a simplified MFA experience by leveraging policy based authentication and step-up. Users where initially challenged for a second factor which was incorporated into the core login flow. The step-up authentication appeared to be no different from when a user was directly logging-in and required no additional factors aside from the KYC processes. The risk associated with the customers transactions was evaluated and step-up authentication was only needed when the user was authenticating from a new device, new location, or when performing a higher risk transaction. Additionally, user behavior was evaluated to ensure that a user was not logging-in from two different locations in the world at the same time.
This implementation improved customer satisfaction and expanded business offerings. Customers were now able to interact with the bank through the platform of their choice and security was delivered in a seamless, easy-to-use, manner. The bank was able to better identify the complete profile of the user and provide a customized experience. This included marketing of new services in a way that was unobtrusive and effective.
Common Mistakes
There are several mistakes that can be avoided to help ensure a successful IAM digital transformation strategy. The biggest technical mistake is leveraging non-integrated tools to deliver you IAM infrastructure. This overly complicates the deployment and also introduces potential security gaps. Look to use tools that are either already tightly integrated or have predefined integration. Validate those systems through a upfront proof-of-concept before making a significant purchase decision.
Additionally, waiting for the “big-bang” release greatly increases risk and reduces your ability to show incremental improvements. Management support for the IAM digital transformation strategy is critical and being able to show quick benefits improves confidence in the solution. If possible, leverage systems that you can easily replace by leveraging smaller services that can be delivered in an agile fashion.
Not taking advantage of seasoned consultants who can help you define and deliver your IAM digital transformation strategy can also hurt your chance of success. Leverage the experience of integrators who have helped other organizations deliver on their strategy. The adage “penny wise pound foolish” is applicable here. Delivery of your strategy and showing success ensure long-term benefit from your IAM solution and executive support.
Conclusion
Your Identity and Access Management digital transformation strategy is a key part of not only your security, but also is a part of your overall digital transformation strategy. IAM provides the foundational layer that supports all of your reimagined business and technological processes. Look at putting the customer first, whether that customer is a buyer or an employee. The user experience is key and that experience can be driven by a powerful identity integration layer and easily consumable microservices.
To deliver upon this strategy start with an internal assessment and review your legacy infrastructure. Identify what is the largest problem and look to address those problems first. Incremental delivery is a clear path to success. Remember that flexibility is important when determining your IAM strategy. Do not lock yourself in to a specific flow if other approaches may provide more benefit. Collaboration is a core part of your strategy. You need buy-in and support across the business to deliver on your new IAM digital transformation strategy.
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