The C-level Strategic Guide for CIAM investment IDG

In this fifth and final episode of our 5-episode podcast, The C-level Strategic Guide for CIAM Investment, we will explore phase 4 on the CIAM Maturity Curve: Continuous.
Customer identity and access management, or CIAM, is fundamentally about “making sure the right people have access to the right things for the right amount of time,” says Keith Casey, API Problem Solver at Okta. For companies in this fourth and final phase of the Maturity Curve, this means using advanced capabilities, such as ingesting and analyzing risk signals from sensors to determine session risks.
“One of the things that all these companies have in common is they want to close the loop. They want to understand when we launch these things in our product, when our customers do x, how do we take understanding from that and feed it back into the product,” says Casey. 
“That’s from a product level. But here we’re talking about from a security perspective. We’re talking about a risk perspective,” he continues. “If we know what common behavior looks like, and this is what common behavior always looks like, when we see things that step outside those boundaries, we can start setting off the fire alarm. 
“Because fundamentally at this point any breach, any vulnerability that we have is almost guaranteed to be catastrophic,” he says. “When you’re supporting 100 million users, when you’re supporting 10 million users, if you have a breach across all that data, you have bad things coming. We can’t let that happen.”
Click here to listen in as Casey explains what it takes to eliminate these risks. Or explore all 5 episodes of our podcast, The C-level Strategic Guide for CIAM Investment.
 Produced by IDG Communications, Inc. in association with Okta.

In this fourth episode of our 5-episode podcast, The C-level Strategic Guide for CIAM Investment, we will explore phase 3 on the CIAM Maturity Curve: Intelligent.
To move from phase 2 (automated) to phase 3 (intelligent) involves a number of important considerations around security and personalization, says Swaroop Sham, Group Product Marketing Manager at Okta.
“From a growth perspective, companies are thinking about protecting not just the data that they store, but also the infrastructure and very importantly, their users,” he explains. In this phase, “security becomes very paramount to both from a compliance standpoint, but also from a brand perspective.”
“From a competitive advantage standpoint, it might be things like having a seamless sign-on process, a seamless authentication, or a reset and recovery process,” he continues.
Other examples of phase 3 security improvements include the following: 

Your app offers strong, possibly passwordless protection

Your use and storage of customer data is fully compliant with data privacy regulations

Your identity security is stringent

You can proactively detect and mitigate risks

Customers use your services with trust and ease

 
 Equally important, says Sham: removing friction across the user journey and applying features that drive personalization and analytics. “We know that personalization is a very key concept today, so companies are looking to hand deliver that personalized experience and leverage identity to deliver that personalized experience,” he notes.
Want to learn more? Join us to hear all the details.
 Produced by IDG Communications, Inc. in association with Okta.

You’ve learned the basics of customer identity and access management (CIAM). And you’ve listened as experts from Okta explained the CIAM Maturity Curve, which helps organizations determine where they fall on the spectrum. 
In this third episode of our 5-episode podcast, The C-level Strategic Guide for CIAM Investment, we will explore phase 2 on the CIAM Maturity Curve: Automated. 
Companies at phase 2 can face a range of new challenges, says Keith Casey, API Problem Solver at Okta. “The biggest challenge we have is that if we did phase one successfully, if we launched our product successfully, we have users and having users is great. Users generate traffic, hopefully they generate revenue,” he says. “But then we start running into problems because as we get more users, the complexity increases. Supporting 10 users and supporting 10,000 users looks a little bit different, but it’s also supporting the integrations that they need.”
“At this stage we can almost become a victim of our own success because at 10 users, regulators, all these organizations, don’t care about us. We’re too small; we’re uninteresting,” he explains. But at “10,000, at 100,000, at 1 million [users], now suddenly they all take interest and we have to solve these problems as cleanly and easily and as safely as possible.”
And how do companies overcome these challenges? Listen in to learn all the details.
 Produced by IDG Communications, Inc. in association with Okta.

So you’ve got a basic understanding of customer identity and access management (CIAM) and why it’s so important. Now it’s time to determine where you fall on Okta’s CIAM Maturity Curve and how to use that assessment to your advantage.
In this second episode of our 5-episode podcast, The C-level Strategic Guide for CIAM Investment, we explore the first level on the CIAM Maturity Curve: basic. 
At this phase you’ve built critical identity security features into your app—and brought it to market. But there are still challenges, says Swaroop Sham, Group Product Marketing Manager at Okta.
“The goals and challenges for organizations, especially for these young, new organizations, is really the speed-to-market equation,” he says. “They have that hunger and appetite to quickly ship a product. I should probably even point out an early, minimal, viable product with basic identity requirements. They want to get that product in front of the customer so that they can get that business validation very quickly and very early.”
Regardless of your stage, every effective CIAM solution should have these three components, Swaroop says:


Proper authentication – ensures that the users logging into their accounts are who they say they are


Effective authorization – helps you confirm that users have the right level of access to applications or resources


Clear user management – enables you to update user access permissions and implement security policies



And what’s next on the spectrum? Phase 2, which includes expanding your product offering to serve a growing customer base. Listen in to learn all the details.
 Produced by IDG Communications, Inc. in association with Okta.

If your customers and clientele don’t feel secure using your products and/or accessing your corporate websites, web portals, and web shops, they won’t sign up, share information, or otherwise engage with your brand. Developing a robust approach to customer identity and access management, aka CIAM, is essential for building this trust.
But many CIOs and CISOs don’t understand CIAM and why it’s so important. In this first episode of our 5-episode podcast, The C-level Strategic Guide for CIAM Investment, we explore the basics of CIAM.
“It’s all about accurately identifying your customers, establishing a digital identity, and then serving your customers based on that established digital identity,” says Swaroop Sham, Group Product Marketing Manager at Okta. “To put it another way, the focus of CIAM is to solve the needs of marketing, security and privacy, to clearly identify and meet the needs of the business, so that you have the right customers onboarded on your platform, verified and having the right level of access into the applications that you serve to them.”
Equally important: understanding the most-common challenges and issues around CIAM, says Keith Casey, API Problem Solver at Okta. “CIOs and CISOs have to understand CIAM because, fundamentally they have a seat at the table. Security is often an afterthought in too many situations; and we need to bring that to the forefront.”
Once companies have a basic knowledge of the challenges and issues around CIAM, Okta has a means for determining where they fall on the CIAM maturity spectrum, and how to move along that maturity scale. Listen in to learn all the details.
 Produced by IDG Communications, Inc. in association with Okta.