Global Businesses See Customer Identity Management as Competitive Differentiator

ForgeRock-sponsored research shows Customer IAM enables  today’s organizations to safeguard customer data, while addressing security and privacy concerns in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) deployments

Sept. 18, 2018 – ForgeRock, the leading platform provider of digital identity management, today released commissioned sponsored research conducted by Forrester Consulting that showed the impact of deploying customer identity solutions for building trust with customers and achieving top-level business objectives. Among the findings, 75 percent of surveyed businesses now see customer privacy as a competitive differentiator. The survey showed that organizations face new challenges when it comes to building customer trust and deploying new technologies securely, and including security concerns with AI and IoT.

The research, conducted in April 2018,  included a poll of more than 400 decision-makers in the US, the UK, France, Germany, China, Japan, and Australia. The full study is available for download, and a supporting infographic is also available.

Key findings from the report include:

Ensuring customer privacy is more than a business priority – it’s an opportunity for competitive differentiation

• Three-quarters (75%) of organizations say that they consider the safeguarding of customers’ privacy to be a competitive differentiator.

• 79% say that safeguarding customers’ privacy is a critical overall business priority and 80% of businesses polled said that security and privacy considerations are built in from the start when developing new products, services and apps.

AI and IoT can potentially undermine customer experience, security, and privacy goals

• The overall objectives of organizations have been greatly influenced by the emergence and increased adoption of new technologies, particularly AI (67% say this has been an influence) and IoT (64%).

• However, security concerns are hindering adoption: 60% of decision-makers feel that their organization’s AI and IoT deployment times have increased due to the security methods they felt were required.

• 57% report that senior management fears AI and IoT will expose customers to greater security and privacy threats and 44% agree that this leads to greater resistance toward further AI and IoT deployments.

• More than half (55%) struggle to retain the staff necessary to ensure AI models function correctly. And, while the data generated from IoT powers digital business today, 51% of organizations find it difficult to both store and secure it.

Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) supports business objectives

• Organizations with advanced CIAM maturity are 20 to 52% more likely to say that their security plans will enable them to achieve their organization’s top-level business objectives – namely winning (88%), serving (89%), and retaining (88%) customers.

• Respondents said that CIAM clears privacy hurdles by ensuring data collection is done strictly within the confines of consent guidelines and without reducing the value of insights generated. Most of those polled said CIAM helps them: better secure customers’ identities (84%); reduce the risk of breaches of customer data (86%); and generate insights from the customer data they collect (84%).

Despite this, less than half of organizations say they use a dedicated CIAM solution

• 48% of businesses polled use a dedicated CIAM solution, with a majority (61%) relying on extensions to existing employee identity and access management (IAM) systems to serve as CIAM stand-ins.

• Despite this, organizations are increasingly providing customers with additional choices when it comes to identity and authorization: 62% of businesses say they deploy two-factor authentication, 61% allow customers to use their social media identities as logins, and 48% use some form of biometrics.

“Consumer consciousness around data privacy and security has increased immensely in the past few years, forcing businesses to make customer privacy a business imperative,” said Eve Maler, Vice President of Innovation & Emerging Technology, ForgeRock. “Concurrently, the influx of AI and IoT-enabled technologies has created vulnerabilities in many data chains. However, the core of AI and IoT-enabled entities is a digital identity imperative that can, and must, be understood and managed. CIAM strategies are key to unlocking the true value of AI and IoT technologies as they uniquely enable companies to deliver the highest level of customer data privacy and the seamless experience today’s consumers are increasingly demanding and expecting.”

About the research
Commissioned by digital identity company ForgeRock and carried out by Forrester Consulting, the research surveyed 409 identity and access management (IAM) decision makers in the US, the UK, France, Germany, China, Japan, and Australia at organizations with 500 or more employees. Survey participants were required to have authority over identity and access management decisions in their organizations. Respondents were asked about IAM technology usage, approaches employed, challenges faced, and benefits received. The study was completed in April 2018.

To learn more about CIAM and ForgeRock’s solutions, please visit www.ForgeRock.com.

About ForgeRock
ForgeRock® is the Digital Identity Management company transforming the way organizations interact securely with customers, employees, devices, and things. Organizations adopt the ForgeRock Identity Platform™ as their digital identity system of record to monetize customer relationships, address stringent regulations for privacy and consent (GDPR, HIPAA, FCC privacy, etc.), and leverage the internet of things. ForgeRock serves hundreds of brands, including Morningstar, Vodafone, GEICO, TomTom, and Pearson, as well as governments such as Norway, New Zealand, and Belgium, among many others. Headquartered in San Francisco, California, ForgeRock has offices in Austin, London, Bristol, Grenoble, Munich, Paris, Oslo, Singapore, Sydney and Vancouver, Washington. ForgeRock is privately held, backed by leading global venture capital firms Accel Partners, Foundation Capital, Meritech Capital and KKR. For more information and free downloads, visit www.forgerock.com or follow ForgeRock on social media:

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