In the past ten years, the rise of privacy-conscious consumers and emerging data regulations have compelled enterprises to prioritize their data management programs. Read more to learn how data privacy has become an enterprise priority.
Introduction
Amazon’s sub-par data management story about its retail platform, if anything, is a cautionary tale. The lapses in understanding how and where data is stored have severely affected how information is managed and secured. In turn, it caused security shortfalls and unnecessary privileged access that rogue employees and sellers had exploited.
Privacy and Security Programs Are Not Just Cost Centers
The opinionated notion of thinking of data security and privacy programs as cost centers have to be questioned and rethought. While such programs do not seemingly contribute to the profits generated by an enterprise, the adverse effects on the topline when such programs fail are visible in too many examples, mostly in terms of lost consumer loyalty and revenue growth. Inversely, data privacy and security today are fundamental to building and operating a successful enterprise that is sustainable in the long term.
Overall, security and privacy are interdependent. Accordingly, enterprise leaders should support such programs as not something to be performed but a priority to be managed with appropriate investments of capital and resources.
An enterprise’s good track record with information security and consumer-focused privacy management can heighten brand value and strengthen market positioning in the current business landscape. Consumers, who have significantly been affected by data breaches, are concerned about what data they share and with whom, as personal or transactional data is ever becoming critical to how consumers live and businesses operate.
In this new paradigm, the amount of data is also growing exponentially. This phenomenon makes the data management practices and technologies widely used a few years ago ineffective, necessitating enterprises to rethink data management strategies and deploy emerging technologies to prepare for and overcome challenges.
In Conclusion
All this implies that data management programs must consider information security and consumer data privacy as fundamental to their success and contribute to an enterprise's topline.
But, how can enterprise leaders navigate this paradigm shift?
In my short yet insightful eBook on data privacy, enterprise leaders will get in-depth insights and much-needed perspectives on managing data security and privacy.
The chapters are as follows:
Chapter I examines the evolutions of the data economy and how it's affecting business operations, growth, and sustainability
Chapter II explains the importance of data privacy and why enterprises need to rethink their approach to data management
Chapter III discusses how enterprises can effectively tackle compliance challenges with emerging data regulations
Chapter IV helps enterprise leaders understand the future of enterprises dealing with more and more data
In detail, I have organized the eBook into chapters mentioned above in addition to an Executive Summary intended for senior executives for a brief overview.
In any organization, a CTO has to wear multiple thinking hats to steer product development, build cybersecurity defenses, navigate uncertainty and drive growth with strategic planning. The role of the CTO becomes even more prominent in engineering product growth to achieve the organization's short- and long-term goals.
The following sections describe how a CTO plays an essential role in driving product growth and navigates the uncertainties and risks associated.
Visionary Thinking
The technological and business landscapes are ever-changing, with innovations in one sector or industry having a broader impact on the overall ecosystem in which an organization operates. For example, AI and machine learning breakthroughs have affected how consumers experience personalization and find information.
Furthermore, in today’s business landscape, if one company improves the experience and value delivery for consumers, other companies in that sector will face the pressure to deliver similar to retain consumers.
This phenomenon is particularly evident in the e-commerce and banking sectors. It does not matter if a company delivers online orders on the same day; consumers expect the same level of service in other areas of their everyday life. Similarly, it does not matter if an unprofitable neobank opens bank accounts for customers instantly; customers expect the same level of convenience from other full-fledged banks.
Emerging and some incumbent players in almost all sectors are disrupting the business ecosystem and affecting consumer expectations. This requires the CTO to think and plan to create guiding policies and frameworks with a supportive culture to enable the organization to disrupt and reinvent itself continuously to withstand technological evolution and meet ever-growing consumer expectations.
Strategic Planning
While visionary thinking helps an organization foresee possibilities and understand how technologies can help achieve business goals, strategic planning is necessary to sustainably achieve the visionary business and operating models set forth.
Strategic planning helps organizations focus on their strength and build transformation levers that help achieve competitive advantage and gain proprietary insights into product development and service delivery. While strategic planning is not a function limited to the CTO, they should collaborate with senior leaders and help them envision how technological improvements, minimizing technical debt, and incorporating cutting-edge research can help the organization stay ahead of consumer expectations and become a trailblazer in their respective industry.
Technological Risk Management
It is a complex risk management domain concerning the security and performance of core business systems and integrations. In general, upgrading and revamping systems architecture and underlying technologies are essential. This, however, attracts additional costs and time, which business leaders can easily perceive as non-priorities and unnecessary cost burdens.
The CTO should lay out a data-driven business story about how these upgrades can deliver performance and business advantages in the short and long term. This helps the CTO collaboratively convince business leaders how this affects future product growth and supports customer retention.
For example, at LoginRadius, APIs are a core component of our customer identity and access management (CIAM) platform. Although the programming language behind our current APIs has performed to our customer expectations, we explored a new opportunity with a different program that we felt would deliver even higher performance. This ensured that our customers and business partners could deliver superior experiences to their consumers.
Engineering Growth Levers
“All happy companies are different, and all unhappy companies are alike in that they fail to escape the sameness that is competition.” -Peter Thiel
A great example is how two companies built around Git—GitHub and GitLab—have embraced different growth levers and are successful in their own ways. Although these two companies are not mutually exclusive in what they do, they position themselves and develop features according to the growth levers they believe. While GitHub embraced open source software and community as its growth lever, GitLab embraced DevOps.
The CTO can immensely contribute to engineering such growth levers. As today's companies don’t fail due to technical limitations but lack of adoption, the CTO’s role is no longer limited to the core technical aspects of the business but also to helping and growing the product with technical insights and strategies that fuel adoption and growth.
Talent Development
Behind every successful product, there are multiple teams consisting of talented individuals collaborating intricately. In today’s landscape, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find and hire qualified, highly skilled individuals. And it is even more challenging to engage and retain them.
Talented individuals do not just want to make a good living out of their work but also seek fulfillment, a sense of accomplishment, and work on challenging technical projects. The CTO can help build talent engagement programs to help teams and individuals work on exciting projects and learn new technical skills.
The CTO can even develop career paths to reward, promote and retain talent and show them a way forward that engages, creates meaning, and creates a sense of purpose and belonging to stay with the organization for the long haul. Furthermore, the CTO should collaborate with the HR department to design and improve processes across the hire-to-retire cycle that deliver a superior on-job experience.
Conclusion
The line between technology and business is blurring faster than ever with overlapping priorities and interdependencies. The CTO, being at the forefront of technology, is well-positioned to help the organization achieve business goals and contribute to product growth and consumer adoption.
B2B applications require connecting customers and partners with their existing identity system or directory. Customers often want their employees or end-users to access your product and service with hierarchical access rights and their existing identity.
Managing these requirements in-house can be tricky and time-consuming. However, the LoginRadius B2B Identity solution can bridge this gap for your business and help you eliminate friction. Above all, it serves a faster go-to-market with an industry-leading deployment time of 3-4 weeks while ensuring the following:
Easy Onboarding and Administration Delegation
LoginRadius B2B Identity allows your customers and partners to effectively create their accounts without needing them to create another identity.
This feature lets you give customers and partners authority to manage accounts and access via their internal identity sources or your dashboard.
Let’s say: your customer wants to allow only marketing and sales employees of the organization to access your B2B application. And within those 20 employees, the access rights will be different. LoginRadius B2B Identity can allow your customer to use their internal identity for authentication and manage the provision and access of their employee accounts within their identity source.
Similarly, suppose some customers do not want to use internal identity for authentication and authorization. In that case, they can easily do this via managing configurations like login method, roles, and permission from your application dashboard. LoginRadius B2B Identity works in the background to smoothly process these requirements.
Maintenance-free SSO Protocols Integration
To allow your customers and partners to use their internal identity for authentication, you must configure Federated SSO protocols depending on their identity application. With LoginRadius B2B Identity, you get effortless integration of the most popular and complex SSO protocols, such as SAML, JWT, and OAuth.
Let’s say one of your customers wants to authenticate using Salesforce while the other prefers to utilize their AWS identities. You can utilize OAuth integration for authentication using Salesforce and SAML integration for authentication using AWS — without understanding both protocols’ complexity and in-depth implementation.
Not just this, integration of these protocols is entirely maintenance-free; any required change or updates in protocols are taken care of by LoginRadius.
Secure and Unified Access
Get a centralized view of all your customers and partners. You can easily manage their identities and access controls (roles and permissions) from the LoginRadius Dashboard or the LoginRadius Management APIs.
Revoke access automatically upon user offboarding to ensure effortless access security to applications of your customers and partners. Similarly, it revokes customers’ and partners’ access rights to your application in case of churn or contract termination.
Reduced IT Support Overhead
LoginRadius B2B Identity lets you delegate admin access to your customers and partners for seamlessly managing their employees and users. Consequently, it saves the efforts and time of your IT support team.
Also, you can set up self-serve registration for your customers and partners, thus saving time in manually setting up their accounts. Similarly, these customers and partners can facilitate self-serve registration for their employees and users.
Data and Privacy Protection
The following built-in capabilities of LoginRadius CIAM lets you meet data regulations and protect customers’ and partners’ data privacy:
Consent management
Preference management
Compliance features for GDPR, CCPA, etc.
Privacy versioning
Audit Logs and Intelligence
LoginRadius Dashboard lets you access your application's audit logs of activities performed by customers and partners.
Also, you can access 30 different analytical charts to understand your customer and partner base and engagement.
Implement B2B Identity Management with LoginRadius
The following explains the step-by-step implementation of LoginRadius B2B Identity:
Set up organizations for your customers and partners
Set up roles and permissions for the organization’s users
Set up organization users and assign them roles
Set up authentication methods for organizations and their users.
These are your customers or partner organizations who need to access your application. You can create and manage these Organizations using the following APIs:
These are the roles that organization users will have to access permission-based resources and processes. You can create, assign, and manage roles using the following APIs:
You can allow organizations to use the organizational identity or ask them to create an identity for authenticating themselves.
Set Global IDP for User: Set a global Identity Provider authentication method from the already enabled authentication methods for your LoginRadius App. The global IDP will apply to organizations of all your customers and partners.
For example: Login with Gmail, Login with Facebook, Login with Email-Password, etc.
For example: Login with Salesforce for one customer and Login with Azure AD for another customer. So, customers and partners can easily authenticate using their identity provider rather than creating a new identity.
In the modern digital world, where customer experience decides the overall growth of a business, crafting a frictionless customer journey holds the most significant importance.
Moreover, when a business embarks on a digital transformation journey, secure and seamless authentication becomes an integral part of its customer success journey.
However, most enterprises aren’t sure whether they need social login on their platform or single sign-on (SSO) to improve user experience and security.
Social login and SSO are both different ways of authentication and can be used together or individually, depending on the business requirements.
Let’s understand the differences between the two terms and how enterprises can make wiser decisions to incorporate a seamless and secure authentication mechanism into their platforms.
What is Social Login?
Social login, also known as social sign-in or social sign-on, allows your consumers to log in and register with a single click on a website or mobile application using their existing accounts from various social providers like Facebook, Google, etc.
Social login simplifies the sign-in and registration experiences, providing a convenient alternative method to create an account where it is mandatory.
Social login reduces the effort to remember passwords, which means people don’t need to create and keep track of more credentials, lessening password fatigue and login failure. Log in via a third-party web page or Facebook or Google accounts can be done with just a few clicks on the button.
What is Single Sign-On (SSO)?
Single Sign-On (SSO) is an authentication method that allows websites to use other trustworthy sites to verify users. Single sign-on enables users to log in to any independent application with a single ID and password.
Verifying user identity is vital to knowing which permissions a user will have. SSO is an essential feature of an Identity and Access Management (IAM) platform for controlling access. The LoginRadius Identity platform is one example of managing access that combines user identity management solutions with SSO solutions.
Customers can use a single identity to navigate multiple web and mobile domains or service applications since they only need to use one password. Also, SSO makes generating, remembering, and using stronger passwords simpler for users.
SSO vs. Login - Understanding the Difference
While both authentication mechanisms are widely used for securely and seamlessly authenticating users, many differences can help better understand their core functionality.
To learn more about the Social Login vs. SSO - concept, differences, and techniques, check out the infographic created by LoginRadius.
Implementing Social Login and SSO with LoginRadius CIAM
LoginRadius' cloud-based CIAM offers endless possibilities to businesses seeking digital transformation by adopting cutting-edge authentication techniques, including social login and SSO.
With LoginRadius’ social login and SSO, businesses can quickly bridge the gap between users and brands since the leading CIAM offers world-class security and a rich consumer experience that increases user engagement, retention rates, and conversion.
If you wish to witness the future of CIAM and how it works for your business, schedule a free personalized demo today!
As technology evolves, businesses explore new horizons to leverage cloud computing in order to acquire more statistics and figures to stay ahead of the curve. Undoubtedly, cloud computing is one of the technological advances that has offered enough room for expanding many industries embarking on a digital transformation journey.
With a compound annual growth rate of 4.8%, the cloud application software market will reach $168.6 billion U.S. dollars by 2025. However, the list is quite extensive when discussing the environmental benefits of relying on the cloud, since the primary motive to rely on the cloud is to boost business operations and security.
Yes, the green cloud is yet another buzzword that portrays the potential environmental benefits of cloud services offered to society. Green cloud portrays the approaches and practices of leveraging technological advances like cloud computing and other IT resources sustainable for environmental benefits by reducing the carbon footprint.
Let's dig deeper into the aspects of the green cloud and how businesses can put their best foot forward in adopting these practices to shape the future of a sustainable global IT landscape.
So, how does the green cloud work? Various cloud service providers are inching towards incorporating multiple strategies to attain greener and sustainable cloud data centers. These efforts are majorly targeted to achieve efficiency improvements in the following areas:
Energy management
One of the essential aspects of green cloud computing is renewable energy to power its data centers across the globe. However, powering the entire data center through renewable energy isn't possible yet, but most of the time, at least 50% of the energy source is solar or wind.
Apart from this, energy is stored within the battery banks and utilized during the days when enough energy can't be produced in real-time. This helps decrease the carbon footprint significantly as more and more renewable energy is consumed in operating and maintaining massive data centers.
Cloud facility
Leveraging renewable energy sources isn't just a goal for green cloud computing; adequate energy efficiency measures are also significant.
The cloud service providers emphasize locating data centers on the ocean floor, underground, or in cold climatic conditions. The providers can save resources and energy by cooling down the servers. Furthermore, many cloud service providers are also working on utilizing the excess heat generated within the data centers in numerous ways.
Additionally, the service providers can also incorporate innovative technologies to monitor and optimize the overall energy consumption and use valuable insights to modify the floor layout for maximum air circulation.
Smart infrastructure
Many cloud providers are now working on optimizing and deploying hardware and software infrastructure that consumes less energy and eventually minimizes the carbon footprint.
Deploying hardware that minimizes power consumption, including dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS), helps ensure optimized use and allotment of resources for maximized power saving.
Workflow management
Cloud providers may utilize multiple strategies for optimizing workflows at different levels, including modifying applications, shifting workloads, and optimizing storage that further helps in reducing energy consumption.
Moreover, valuable data insights can also be used to design an optimized workflow that saves time, energy, and resources.
Impact of green cloud on the environment
Minimized carbon footprint: One of the biggest challenges that the world faces today is the high carbon footprint. With the green cloud computing concept, businesses can eventually contribute to minimizing carbon footprints and ensure they build a sustainable future.
Low power consumption: When we discuss leveraging the green cloud computing processes, we save on resources and massive amounts of power that otherwise would get squandered.
Lower costs: Cloud providers can minimize their expenditure on maintaining data centers by leveraging ways to optimize cooling costs and reduce the total number of resources. This helps in saving a good amount of money in the long run.
Fast updates: When we talk about hardware and software updates for the data center, providers can ensure that they can quickly implement changes related to data center optimization and save precious time.
The concept of green cloud computing isn't a luxury anymore; it's swiftly becoming an absolute necessity for a sustainable future for our upcoming generations.
Cloud providers should understand the endless possibilities and advantages of incorporating innovative green cloud computing that helps them save time, energy, and resources — and eventually helps establish the foundation stone for a greener future.
In a world where digital experiences define business success, cross-device authentication could offer businesses endless possibilities for embarking on a digital transformation journey.
Every internet user demands a rich and secure customer experience. And if they’re not catered with up-to-snuff experiences, they’ll switch to competitors.
Hence, businesses need to know what their customers want. But how can this be achieved, especially if users aren’t comfortable sharing their details in the first interaction with the platform?
Businesses need to utilize critical user data to assess user behavior and preferences, which can only be done by tracking users across multiple devices.
Here’s where the crucial role of cross-device tracking comes into play!
Cross-device tracking can be defined as the technologies that enable quick tracking of users across multiple devices, including laptops, smartphones, tablets, etc. It portrays the assortment of methods used to identify users and know if a single user utilizes different devices.
However, leveraging various technologies and methods for tracking users across multiple platforms has underlying risks.
Let’s uncover the aspects of cross-device authentication and tracking and what business owners need to understand.
What is Cross-Device Authentication and Tracking?
Cross-device authentication refers to providing access to users on multiple devices using a single authentication method. This authentication helps streamline the user experience while switching devices and delivers a unified experience.
Cross-device tracking, on the other hand, refers to the process of tracking the number of devices on which a user is logged in to a single account. This tracking is usually leveraged to collect crucial user information, including cookies stored on different devices that help create personalized marketing strategies.
However, collecting crucial user preferences and behavior information isn’t always reliable and secure.
Tracking users on different devices and fetching details has vulnerabilities, leading to data breaches and compromised user information.
Hence, businesses collecting user information should consider relying on secure ways of collecting user information that doesn’t create any risk for themselves and their customers.
Risks Associated with Cross-Device Authentication and Tracking
Fetching user details from their devices isn’t something that can be considered safe, especially when maintaining adequate privacy and security.
Businesses may compromise their sensitive information and customer details, which can lead to losses and fines worth millions of dollars since the data regulation and privacy laws like the GDPR and CCPA are rapidly becoming stringent.
Hence, it’s essential for business owners to ensure the highest level of data privacy protection and security while collecting, storing, and managing customer information.
How Can Businesses Gather Crucial User Insights Securely Without Compromising User Experience?
Businesses must pay close attention to consumer experience and the total digital and in-person interactions a user has with a brand. At baseline, a good consumer experience needs to work to deliver products and services with minimal fuss and utmost security.
And if a business wants to pull out and stay ahead of the curve, that experience needs to be remarkable, personal, and delightful.
With a smart CIAM like LoginRadius, businesses can collect user data over time that can be used to create marketing strategies as enterprises understand whom they should target.
Moreover, businesses can successfully target their customer base with data collected and organized in the Admin Console. The LoginRadius Identity Platform makes complex customer analytics easy to understand via detailed graphs and customer insights.
Also, enterprises can export data visualization elements, including graphs and pie charts, to Microsoft Excel by clicking a button. Customer analytics has never been much easier with LoginRadius Admin Console as it also supports effortless integration with insights and analytics applications for enhanced data visualization.
The smart CIAM lets you expand your understanding of customer activity over different periods of your sales or season cycles.
What’s more remarkable is that you can export data visualization elements to third-party applications for in-depth data analysis that further helps create winning strategies.
Customer analytics has never been more accessible with the LoginRadius Admin Console.
The Bottom Line
Cross-device authentication and tracking could be quite beneficial for businesses as it opens new doors to marketing opportunities.
However, the risks associated with customer data collection, storage, and management can’t be overlooked since cybercriminals always search for loopholes to sneak into a business network.
Choosing a reliable customer identity and access management (CIAM) solution like LoginRadius to get valuable customer insight ensures robust security while data is collected, stored, and managed without compromising user experience.
While businesses embark on a digital transformation journey, cloud adoption is undoubtedly the cornerstone for new-age enterprises.
Statistics reveal that the global cloud applications market is expected to reach 168.6 billion U.S. dollars by 2025, which was 133.6 Billion U.S. dollars back in 2021. Moreover, the cloud application market is also anticipated to grow at an annual growth rate of 4.8 percent.
However, the surging demand for the cloud doesn’t necessarily guarantee security for sensitive business and consumer information; certain risks associated with cloud computing are still the bottleneck of many enterprises.
What’s more worrisome is that many enterprises using cloud computing are still relying on user ids and password authentication. This can be quite risky, especially when breaching frail authentication mechanisms isn’t a tough nut to crack.
Here’s where the critical role of biometric authentication comes into play!
Let’s dig deeper into this and understand the aspects of biometric authentication that help businesses stay ahead of the competition without compromising security.
Why passwords and PINs won’t work in a digitally advanced modern world?
Stats reveal that authentication methods like PINs and passwords are still widely used across various cloud applications with 63.02 percent of businesses still relying on standard login. And the reason behind their existence in the 21st century is the fact that most brands find it simple, portable, familiar, and inexpensive to deploy.
This is where organizations fall prey to several cybersecurity threats and compromise crucial business information that can cause losses worth millions of dollars.
Cyber attackers are always on a hunt for weak passwords that can be guessed or compromised using various tricks, including phishing, social engineering, or brute force attack.
Besides this, organizations relying on password authentication mechanisms are also at risk of compromising sensitive consumer information. If they lose consumer data, they could be entitled to hefty fines since consumer data privacy, and security laws like GDPR and CCPA are getting more stringent.
So can’t we implement stronger password policies? Yes, we do, but today’s digital-first workplace and new-age consumers demand a frictionless authentication experience right from the moment they interact with a brand.
Using robust authentication mechanisms, including biometric authentication, can help brands ensure the highest level of security since these authentication methods are pretty much harder to bypass.
Bridging the gap with biometric authentication
With biometrics, users can leverage secure and quick authentication and authorization without compromising user experience.
Moreover, biometric authentication is firmly established and supported by various robust cloud data privacy and security standards that ensure user information is gathered, stored, and managed securely and no unauthorized person has access to it.
Biometric authentication can be implemented at various checkpoints when discussing organization-level security and user workflow, especially when systems are deployed over the cloud.
Whether PCs or smartphones, biometric authenticators in the form of fingerprint scanners and facial recognition systems can be of great help, especially in scenarios where there are multiple authentication requirements.
Apart from this, organizations can consider relying on biometric hardware-based tokens that offer access to sensitive resources on a network without conventional authentication processes demanding usernames and passwords.
Multi-factor authentication (MFA) and biometrics
When securing crucial business information and sensitive consumer data, multi-factor authentication plays a vital role.
MFA ensures that the user goes through multiple layers of authentication before accessing any resource or system.
Conventionally MFA may ask users to provide a one-time password sent to them through text on their phone or email. Once the user enters the password, the session is authenticated.
However, this procedure may hamper the user experience. Thus, biometric MFA could be a game-changer since it quickly analyzes one of the unique biometric identifiers and rapidly provides access.
Also, biometric authentication in MFA is considered more secure when compared to other conventional methods since every person has a unique biometric identifier.
The bottom line
With technology evolving leaps and bounds and businesses swiftly adopting cloud capabilities, security is often overlooked, especially concerning authentication.
Biometric authentication offers the next level of authentication security for cloud applications and devices that connects users and provides access to resources.
Businesses planning to leverage the cloud for digital transformation shouldn’t ignore the importance of biometric authentication as a part of their information security policy.
![SSO vs. Social Login: What’s the Difference? [Infographic]](https://guptadeepak.com/content/images/2022/06/sso-social-login.jpg)
![SSO vs. Social Login: What’s the Difference? [Infographic]](https://www.loginradius.com/blog/static/defe8e479919e1128141d8cfed2029d4/e5715/social-login-sso.png "social-login-sso")
![SSO vs. Social Login: What’s the Difference? [Infographic]](https://www.loginradius.com/blog/static/c1e91fba5af538f6c6d72cff947c5e57/d3746/sso-social-login.jpg)
