Commissioned by BEYOND IDENTITY

1 Introduction / Executive Summary

Digital identity is at the heart of every organization's digital transformation. In essence, digital transformation is commonly regarded as an implementation or process that organizations go through to make better use of emerging technologies in response to employee or customer expectations. If digital transformation is a response to the changing business landscape, digital identity has become the foundation of the digital economy. 

As a result, businesses and organizations need Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions to manage digital identities as they access applications, data, and resources.  Traditional IAM systems were designed from the point of view that an enterprise provisions and manages all the identities of employees. Most organizations have IAM products in place already. However, many are finding that their current solutions are not able to meet customer expectations or security requirements.

In order to deter fraud, comply with new regional and industry-specific regulations, and improve customer experiences, organizations are adopting Consumer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) solutions. CIAM is a parallel to traditional IAM that has become a substantial market of its own. While the market continues to grow, many vendors are offering mature solutions with standard and deluxe features to serve millions of users across all sectors.

CIAM has diverged from traditional IAM in supporting some baseline features for analyzing customer behavior, as well as collecting consent for user data usage and securely storing data for those users. Unlike IAM systems which handle hundreds of thousands of users with complex access control use cases, some CIAM systems can store billions of user identities and undertake hundreds of millions of login processes.

Organizations must find new ways to assess and manage security risks while remaining secure and compliant without causing disruptions to their customers and business operations.

By providing a transparent and secure digital experience at every stage of the customer lifecycle, CIAM solutions can help companies acquire customers faster, manage their identities, enhance user experience, and improve scalability. Essentially, CIAM systems are designed to provision, authenticate, authorize, collect, and store information about consumers from across many domains.

Therefore, CIAM is a real differentiator that can help businesses grow through the process of digital transformation by providing better consumer experiences, strengthening data privacy, and increasing security. Although CIAM systems generally use weak password-based authentication, they also support social logins and other more robust authentication methods. Yet existing solutions for customer authentication do not eliminate the source of friction and security risk - the password.

Organizations often face high maintenance costs if they rely on passwords for customer authentication. Not only is password authentication insecure, but it is also inconvenient for customers and expensive to maintain. Since password elimination is recognized as a fundamental goal for the IT security industry, passwordless options are increasingly gaining popularity and widespread adoption.

In recent years, credential-based attacks and account takeover fraud cases have been on the rise, which have disrupted businesses and organizations already overstretched by the COVID-19 pandemic. By removing the risk associated with passwords, however, organizations could prevent password-based threats while increasing the overall security posture of their organizations.

Therefore, organizations need to innovate their authentication methods, eliminate passwords, and implement an approach that is scalable, secure, and user-friendly. As a result of getting rid of passwords, organizations will be able to adopt and implement a modern authentication system that does not rely on users remembering passwords; thus, simultaneously increasing security and convenience.

By removing passwords and other phishable factors, Beyond Identity provides Secure Customers, which is a secure and frictionless authentication solution. Its invisible passwordless multi-factor authentication (MFA) enables companies to secure access to applications and critical data with dynamic risk-based access decisions, make credential-based attacks and account takeover fraud extremely difficult to execute by fully eliminating the password, and dramatically improve the user experience with no need for one-time passcodes (OTP), push notifications, or second devices.