Philippe Allard | Product Manager
Businesses and their partners must work together without barriers to maximize customer value. The difficulty lies in determining how to make the most of their collaboration in a flexible, scalable, agile, and secure way. At its core, this challenge calls for a robust CIAM platform to help connect and protect organizations’ business-to-business ecosystems. This is exactly what we will be discussing in this blog post.
The importance of centralized partner identity management
Seamless collaboration with your business partners often requires that you give them access to your organization’s applications or shared resources. However, in a digital world where each of your business partners’ users might already be juggling multiple identities, you don’t want to hinder their user experience by asking them to create yet another identity in order to access your apps or internal systems. At the same time, you might be dealing with an ever-expanding business ecosystem and managing dozens of partner identities on your own. To effectively manage the identities of your business partners, you must be able to centralize them so you can easily connect them, creating frictionless experiences for them that are also secure. And you can achieve this with the right CIAM technology.
How CIAM delivers a seamless digital experiece
Let's examine a real-life use case to understand how CIAM delivers a seamless digital experience while ensuring security, privacy, and compliance.
Most of us know the European Central Bank (ECB). As a supervisory authority, the ECB requires a wide variety of processes and supporting applications, all of which are available to the users of the banks the EBC supervises through a portal. To provide the highest level of security, the bank strictly controls who can access these applications. The bank adheres to a Zero Trust security model and requires European data residency for all its data processing.
Due to these strict requirements, the ECB could never use a fragmented approach to access control. Instead, they require a flexible, unified CIAM platform that can easily delegate user and access management to the banks and other parties the institution oversees. Having a singe CIAM platform that centralizes all cooperating parties and their apps for information exchange, document supervision, and breach notifications streamlines collaboration and increases security.
Next to that, CIAM allows delegated administrators within supervised banks to grant authority to invite other users to complete tasks and share data with the ECB via a fine-grained access control model. This relieves the ECB of the responsibility and administrative burden of having to maintain these users, which is a major advantage considering the vast user base.
How CIAM enables effective partner identity management
CIAM solutions simplify registration, onboarding, delegation management, and access control for users from the organizations you collaborate and share information with. CIAM secures and streamlines Business-to-Business (B2B) relationships and allows you to easily connect and protect your entire B2B ecosystem, empowering you to:
1. Streamline the onboarding of your business partners with intuitive, user-friendly interfaces and processes.
2. Enhance cooperation, boost business growth, and value chain integration with suppliers and external partners through cascaded identity lifecycle management.
3. Manage, scale, and automate temporary access to prevent time-consuming processes while being compliant with security and privacy regulations.
4. Save on operational costs from managing remote accounts by delegating their administration to your business partners with the aid of thorough audit trails.
5. Provide developers with APIs and SDKs for simple B2B identity integration to ensure secure communication between ecosystems while building business functionality.
To experience the benefits of CIAM, invest in a reputable platform that is proven to successfully help organizations streamline collaboration with their business partners without causing friction, lowering productivity, or jeopardizing security. A CIAM solution that strikes the much-desired balance between security and user experience.