What’s New in Customer Identity and Access Management

by Lorenz Jakober on October 14, 2020

We all know that the ability to accurately identify, understand, and engage our customers across multiple channels and digital touchpoints is absolutely vital to the digital customer experience and business. This couldn’t be more important in the current environment as we continue to move more of our lives online.

Yet we see brands struggle across three areas when attempting to effectively engage customers:

Delivering subpar customer experiences that include increased friction with multiple logins across properties, lackluster app performance, scalability and availability issues, and no 360-degree view of the user
Trying to establish trust with no collection of consent or preference choices that are often in violation of data regulations such as the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in the United States
Struggling to keep user data safe with the often uncontrolled sprawl of customer data, weak data encryption, and no protection from network-based threats and attacks

Akamai can help here with Identity Cloud, a solution for customer identity and access management (CIAM). It enables brands to provide their customers with low-friction user experiences for the creation, use, and management of personal accounts on the digital properties of the company, such as websites, mobile apps, or connected devices. Customers can register, log in, and manage their accounts (such as specifying preferences, consent, and privacy settings).

In addition to improving user experiences, Akamai Identity Cloud provides organizations with the back-end functionality to manage and monitor accounts as well as store, analyze, and report on customer profile data. It also enables the ability to manage the flow of data throughout the enterprise ecosystem — for example, sharing email addresses with an email marketing system.

Identity Cloud is delivered as software as a service (SaaS) and can scale to handle complex consumer-facing use cases with up to hundreds of millions of identities, intelligently accommodating spikes in usage. It is also designed to comply with regulatory requirements around the world.

As part of the October 2020 Akamai platform update, Identity Cloud will be even more powerful, flexible, and easier to use. Specifically, we’re introducing two-factor authentication (2FA) for the Hosted Login capability, expanded integration support, and a new pricing model.

Historically, CIAM implementations were either quick to deploy but offered limited customization, or offered unlimited customization but were more difficult to deploy — Hosted Login establishes a middle ground between these two extremes. It’s much quicker to add CIAM to a website or app by using Hosted Login than with the Identity Cloud JavaScript software developer kit (SDK). This is especially true for large organizations that need to deploy a number of sites or applications. Hosted Login strikes a balance between ease of use and flexibility, while increasing protection with mobile number 2FA experiences that are enabled as a required or opt-in security feature for end users.

In addition, an updated version of our Identity Cloud Integration Bus offers self-service integration support, allowing you to share data between Identity Cloud and a large number of other platforms, including Salesforce, Adobe, and OneTrust. You can now configure your own integrations using a visual, easy-to-understand interface, requiring no development knowledge or support.

Lastly, we’re providing more flexibility and cost savings with a new monthly average user pricing model. With this model, Identity Cloud allows quantity usage entitlements for anonymous, registered, and monthly active users associated with customer applications.

It’s time to effectively and accurately identify, understand, and engage your customers across multiple channels and digital touchpoints. Identity Cloud helps you ensure a quality digital customer experience, no matter the traffic conditions.

To learn more about Akamai customer identity and access management, please visit akamai.com/ciam.

There will be more opportunities to engage with us on this and more at Edge Live | Adapt. Sign up to see how customers are leveraging these improvements, engage in technical deep dives, and hear from our executives how Akamai is evolving for the future.