Customer Identity and Access Management, and Challenges Associated With It: Rakesh Soni, CEO, LoginRadius

In the business world, customer experience (CX) is emerging as one of the yardsticks for gauging the identity of a brand. CX has become one of the main focuses for businesses today and Customer identity and access management (CIAM) enables organisations to do so. However, notwithstanding all the benefits that CIAM holds, managing customer data has challenges of its own. In an interview with DataQuest, Rakesh Soni, Co-founder and CEO, LoginRadius, expains to reader about CIAM, challenges and benefits associated with it, and what LoginRadius has to offer for clients.

Excerpts

What is Customer Identity and Access Management?

Rakesh: Customer identity and access management (CIAM) empowers associations to safely capture and oversee customer identity and profile information, and control client access to applications and administrations.

Solid CIAM arrangements usually give a blend of highlights including customer registration, self-service account management, consent and preference management, single sign-on (SSO), multi-factor authentication (MFA), access management, catalog administrations and data access governance. The best CIAM arrangements guarantee a protected, consistent client involvement with extraordinary scale and execution, regardless of which channels (web, mobile, and so forth.) clients use to draw in with a brand.

These arrangements can be conveyed by means of programming that can be sent on premises or in private clouds, or through API-first IDaaS platforms. API-first platforms are designed for advancement groups who need to install customer identity and access management into their applications utilizing REST APIs. Despite how they're conveyed, the objective is to transform straightforward client experience into genuine client commitment.

What are the challenges associated with securing and managing customer data?

Rakesh:

Managing the Extensive Volume of Data: Business enterprises need the capacity to process substantial volumes of customer data so that critical information is settled to the chiefs as and when they need it.

Executing the Right Technology: In recent years, cloud computing has rapidly become a popular resource for CIOs from all backgrounds and for good reasons. In large business organizations, deciding where to house data is a difficult question that is largely determined by how that data will be utilized. Cloud is helping answer these questions. CIOs used to prefer to keep companies’ data relatively nearby and stored domestically. This was often difficult for large companies with offices in multiple locations. But, cost-effective cloud options are helping CIOs mitigate the risks associated with long-term investments in legacy systems and local servers. With businesses having access to more and more data every day, storing the data is tricky. CIOs today are using a hybrid approach (using local metal servers as well as cloud) as it provides a more flexible option for storing data.

Hosting systems and storing data on the cloud also provides a safeguard in case of emergencies.  CIOs realize that man-made and natural disasters can damage equipment, shut off power and incapacitate critical IT functions in a company. Saving data on the cloud, therefore, brings with it an important advantage for companies.

Protecting Customer Data: With data being perceived as a key business resource by various enterprises, security of that data is one of the key concerns. Data breaches across various organisation around the globe have expanded definitely in the course of recent years.

How is LoginRadius helping companies manage the identity, access, and security of their online customers?

Rakesh: As a provider of a fully managed cloud CIAM solution, LoginRadius prioritizes guaranteed system performance. Most of our clients are growing, especially those in the media and publications, retail and consumer, and travel and hospitality sectors, and LoginRadius recognizes the need for a highly scalable and adaptable platform that can grow with them. LoginRadius has focused our efforts on building a robust infrastructure that continuously provides industry-leading availability and security for clients with hundreds of millions of users. Serving over 3,000 businesses and with a monthly reach of 700 million users worldwide, LoginRadius aims to maintain the 100% uptime benchmark to ensure flawless connection and availability at all times.

The LoginRadius CIAM platform is designed with security as the highest priority, ensuring that customer data and identity are protected without sacrificing performance, availability, or scalability. With digital transformation rapidly changing the business landscape, customers are demanding more personalized experiences without increasing security risks to their personal information. This requires CIAM platforms to be more transparent about the data they collect, how it is being used, and how it is being protected. LoginRadius’ CIAM solution currently holds hosting and data security approval for all of the most commonly used compliances.

What would your marketing strategy be for the India market?

Rakesh: We are primarily focusing on companies which have demonstrated adoption of enterprise cloud technologies and care of customer experience and security. We also target tech startups who need CIAM. Our global marketing strategy includes Indian Market and we will continue investing more to push the adoption of our CIAM platform.

What are the opportunities and challenges associated with the market in India for cloud-based Customer Identity Management platforms?

Rakesh: India is set to be the world's third largest economy in the next 10 years and most of the businesses will go digitally to serve their customers. So I see an immense opportunity for CIAM technology and believe Indian companies will be one of the largest CIAM buyers by the number of identities. However, the Indian market has its own challenges. In the current time, there are three key challenges:

Cloud adoption: Adoption of enterprise cloud products is very low as companies go and build a lot of technologies in-house due to low manpower cost. However, this is shifting dramatically and the market will hit a tipping point in 3-5 years when everyone will buy cloud products.

Privacy is still not a big concern: Privacy has not become a pressing issue in the Indian market and the government has not taken any steps to enforce privacy. But as Indian companies are going live and consumers started demanding privacy, we are very close to the point where privacy is going to be a major concern and Indian Government will come up with strict privacy laws similar to GDPR. The CIAM will become very critical to ensure privacy regulations are followed.

Customer Experience has not become competitive differentiator: Indian economy is in an early phase of capitalism and competition is not as aggressive yet, however, with fueling innovation and entry of global players, the customer experience has started becoming important and CIAM plays the most critical role in building the modern experience.