Customer identity: Your brand’s front door

As the front door to your company’s digital experiences, identity is the lynchpin for customer apps and portals. However, authentication, authorization, and user management make up just part of the overall customer experience (CX). Application development organizations tasked with building disruptive, differentiated mobile and web apps face several competing priorities and lots of complexity. Often, teams are juggling multiple apps, sister brands, country-specific products, omni-channel requirements, various user types, and constantly evolving security threats.

Given the many dimensions above, it should come as little surprise that CX initiatives to reduce user friction and secure customer data are never really “complete.” Many teams mistakenly think that once they’ve developed basic identity services for an app—such as account creation, login, and password resets—they can ship their code and move on to other projects. But within a year, most recognize that there’s always more work required to maintain effective customer identity and access management (CIAM). Even if you rolled-your-own identity initially, there’s no denying that CIAM is an ongoing journey.

As part of Okta’s work with thousands of digital businesses, we’ve encountered a number of misconceptions that tend to hinder developers and architects from upgrading home-grown CIAM with a more modern, future-proof identity layer.