Supporting Identity Management Day

What is Identity Management Day?

Identity Management Day takes place annually on the second Tuesday of April. The event is an initiative from the National Cybersecurity Alliance and the Identity Defined Security Alliance (IDSA).

With data breaches reported in the news every day, and the vast majority of these being caused by weak, stolen or compromised passwords, there is rightly an ever greater focus on best-practice identity management. Identity Management Day is being introduced to bring greater awareness to what business leaders and consumers can do to avoid such risks.

While we already have lots of wider cybersecurity initiatives – like Cybersecurity Month, Data Protection Day, and even International Identity Day – Identity Management Day focuses its aims on the tools and strategies that individuals and organisations can use in a corporate context.

 

Top identity management tips for business leaders

Customer identity management needs aren’t met by workforce identity management tools

Customers (and other external users, like citizens) and employees (internal users) have different identity management needs. For example, while employees are often trained to use systems, customers will not stand for less-than-intuitive experiences.

Another key difference is in how you manage those identities internally – (hopefully) your customer base is growing at a faster rate than your employee base. While HR may be able to onboard each employee manually, customer identity management needs to be fully automated or you risk wasting significant in-house resource.

To meet customer needs, leverage a specialised Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) system, not a legacy employee-focused IAM system. See: IAM vs CIAM.

Identity management is not just IT’s responsibility

Identity management capabilities like passwordless authentication, multi-factor authentication (MFA) and single sign-on (SSO) have benefits beyond IT security. User experience is critical to digital services, and identity management is a key area for making or breaking frictionless workflows. It also contributes greatly to business aims like operational efficiency and compliance to regulations. Therefore, as the benefits of identity management span departments, so must responsibility and budget for identity management.

Don’t reinvent the wheel – buy APIs

Identity management is complex. The skillset required to build, maintain and grow your identity management system is highly specialised. Even if you can find in-house resource to achieve your identity management goals, with time to keep up to date with industry standards and trends, how can you be sure that you can retain such talent?

It is far less risky to buy identity management APIs from a specialised identity management vendor. This way, you plug in a tried and tested solution while your developers can get back to what they do best – your organisation’s core business. See: Build vs Buy – IAM.

Get started quickly with IDaaS

Identity management can be deployed in an on-premises, Identity-as-a-Service (IDaaS) or hybrid solution. As IDaaS is a cloud solution, it’s faster to market than deploying on-premises identity management, and much faster than building identity management capabilities in-house.

IDaaS allows you to embed core identity management capabilities – like frictionless registration and login, SSO and MFA – as a seamless, managed service.

See how it could work for your business. Get started with a free IDaaS trial.