Author: Jordan Griffith

Many enterprises anticipated that digital transformation would play a foundational role to growing their business, keep pace with innovation and maintain a competitive advantage in 2020. But no one anticipated a global pandemic that would shut down offices and shift how consumers engage with brands online.

In response, enterprises accelerated digital transformation initiatives by leveraging identity to enable a productive remote workforce and meet the expectations of customers who increasingly use digital channels rather than going to brick and mortar locations. These changes have proven to not only be temporary trends but permanent changes in how employees work and customers interact with businesses. 

Digital transformation initiatives backed by identity and access management have been fast tracked to ensure enterprises can remain competitive, secure and agile in the rapid changing business environment that is becoming increasingly borderless. Over the past year, we at Ping have observed different approaches organizations are taking to digitally transform their enterprise using identity. Many businesses we interact with have consolidated their digital transformation efforts around three journeys:

• Moving identity to the cloud as fast as possible
• Meeting customer demand by innovating digital experiences
• Securing the borderless enterprise by adopting Zero Trust and passwordless approaches

This year at Identiverse, we wanted to take an in-depth look at each of these different approaches to empower your organization to take next steps in your journey to migrate identity to the cloud, innovate the digital experience or adopt a Zero Trust security model. Read on to get a sneak peek at what we will be talking about at Identiverse to see what you can expect in Denver—and virtually—this summer. 

Journey to Identity in the Cloud

Cloud-first mandates tend to go hand-in-hand with digital transformation initiatives as moving workloads to the cloud enables an organization with the flexibility, cost efficiencies and agility required to enable these changes. The reality is that for large enterprises the transition to the cloud will not happen overnight. Often, this shift will involve adopting a hybrid cloud infrastructure that is a combination of public cloud workloads and infrastructure with on-premise workloads and infrastructure that is optimized to meet business requirements. 

As an enterprise adopts a hybrid cloud strategy, identity and access management becomes even more important to secure access to resources that are distributed across datacenters and clouds. Organizations will need to be able to identify users and grant them the right level of access to the right things at the right time, regardless of where the resource is hosted. 

As momentum within the enterprise starts to build towards taking a cloud-first approach to support digital transformation initiatives, now is the time for organizations to start to build and execute a strategy of how to transition identity solutions to the cloud. Many organizations are coalescing around these steps to migrate their infrastructure to the cloud:

1. Establish a cloud identity with a global authentication authority
2. Optimize cloud identity with MFA, risk management and identity verification
3. Consolidate identity in the cloud by removing reliance on legacy identity systems

These three steps can help an organization meet and deliver on cloud-first mandates to provide the cost efficiencies, flexibility and agility for digital transformation success. 

Delivering Extraordinary Digital Experiences

In today’s digital first world, customer demand and expectation in digital experiences have never been higher. A combination of preference, convenience and a global pandemic has made customers choose to engage with brands more online, while innovation from brands such as Apple and Amazon has increased customer expectations in every digital experience. It has become more challenging for brands to deliver the seamless, secure digital customer experiences that generate revenue and build loyalty. 

Meeting these expectations ultimately comes down to the business being able to answer the question – “Who are you?”. Customer identity and access management (CIAM) makes answering that question quickly and easy through your digital channels a reality. Enhancing customer identity throughout the entire user journey enables brands to innovate the digital experience with the ability to establish consistent and frictionless access across every channel while boosting security by capturing and enforcing privacy. 

Innovative digital experiences can deliver tremendous business value by helping brands acquire and retain customers with seamless registration and single-sign on, increase revenue with personalized experiences that can provide cross and up-sell opportunities, and build loyalty through protecting data and privacy with frictionless security. Additionally with the rise of customer online engagement, leveraging customer identity to innovate digital experience can help set a brand apart from the competition. 

Taking a Zero Trust Approach to Secure the Enterprise

In the past year, once bustling offices turned quiet as work from home policies became the norm at enterprises around the world. Now, employees need access to critical applications and resources to remain productive as they work outside of the network perimeter. This rapid shift to remote work induced by the global pandemic has shone a spotlight on the gaps in the traditional network security approach and has left many organizations needing to evolve their strategy on how they secure their work-from-anywhere workforce. 

Enterprises are turning to a Zero Trust approach which relies on “never trust, always verify”. In adopting a Zero Trust strategy for security, organizations are assuming the network is always hostile, internal and external threats are always on the network and being on the corporate network is not sufficient to trust a user. At the core of any Zero Trust strategy is an identity security approach to ensure every user and device is authenticated before they can access sensitive resources and data. This is essential to ensuring employees can securely access the applications they need to be successful no matter where they are.

As organizations are integrating elements of Zero Trust into their security strategy, many are using identity as the first step in their journey. Focusing on identity at the very beginning gives enterprises the opportunity to create a centralized authentication authority to consistently authenticate users across the organization, reduce or even remove the need for passwords, improve the user experience to increase productivity and continuously monitor and assess risk to quickly detect and respond to potential harmful activity. 

Get Ready for Your Digital Transformation Journey

Last year proved that digital transformation initiatives are key to business growth during rapid change. Many organizations are making the journey by migrating to the cloud, innovating the digital experience and adopting a Zero Trust security strategy to remain competitive in this environment. Join Ping Identity at Identiverse 2021 to see how your organization can take the right steps on this journey to realize digital transformation success.