Delivering Better User Experiences with Identity Orchestration

Around the world, companies of all sizes and in all sorts of industries are re-examining their approach to identity. That’s because identity is foundational for almost every digital interaction: 

Identity fuels those experiences.

The front door to your business is now digital, and companies who consistently provide the best user experiences win. Therefore, an organization’s approach to identity is essential for survival. Those that can deliver a personalized, secure, and frictionless experience, will gain market share.

Look at some of the industry leaders today: Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Tesla, all of which comfortably sit within the top 10 of market capitalization. 

What do they all have in common? Cutting-edge technology that aids in delivering secure and excellent user experiences, resulting in tremendous loyalty and repeat business from their user base. And, they’re able to do it at scale. But most organizations don’t have the investment or developer resources to easily create comparable identity experiences. 

Until now.

Identity orchestration is the answer to designing world-class user experiences without heavy custom coding or an army of developers. The promise of identity orchestration is centered around maximizing existing technology investments and infrastructure. 

Read on to learn how organizations can leverage orchestration as the foundation of digital experience.

Identity orchestration enables organizations to design and optimize user experiences rapidly. They can execute these experiences without difficult integrations or high development costs. Let’s breakdown a more classical, technical definition:

Low-Code/Adaptive

Orchestration has emerged due to the rigid nature of traditional identity systems. Identity is a mission-critical technology that historically has been difficult to change; even small changes require custom code. Orchestration enables organizations to test ideas and make changes without long development cycles, due to low-code/no-code and adaptive architectures.

Integration Framework

The number of apps and services is constantly growing as enterprises build or acquire new technologies in order to stay competitive. But often, identity becomes a bottleneck in getting these apps live as integration delays occur. Orchestration enables organizations to add and/or remove applications with speed and ease.

Seamless Identity Journeys

The history of identity is steeped in the employee use case. But, now customer identity is where most of the innovation is occuring. Customer identity is growing after years of organizations failing to build those capabilities in-house. Within customer identity, enterprises must focus on the experience more than ever before or risk losing users to competing services. 

Orchestration is an essential capability that stitches a user experience across all your digital assets. Point identity solutions around passwordless authentication, fraud detection, identity verification, etc., must be integrated as part of a larger application ecosystem. Customers also have high expectations around self-service, privacy, etc., which require a security experience with the proper authentication and authorization checks in place to make users comfortable.

Identity and Access Management (IAM) has traditionally been a specialty field within cybersecurity; a technical expertise in its own right. However, more teams have emphasized identity as companies accelerated investment in digital transformation. Identity is the fabric that connects your assets together: people, devices, applications, APIs, etc. Without the right identity capabilities, digital transformation projects will fail to reach their potential.

To make your digital experiences seamless and secure, your identity system has to be agile and scalable. That’s where orchestration comes into play. It provides a unified view of the user experience for various stakeholders. 

Below are the key players and how orchestration empowers them:

Identity Experts

Identity experts want to work on innovative projects but end up using a lot of resources maintaining fragile systems. Orchestration removes barriers around testing, implementing, and optimizing new technologies—making it easier and faster than ever. Identity experts know best what feature and capability gaps exist in their infrastructure, and orchestration provides a path towards modernizing those capabilities without a tedious or long migration.

Additionally, orchestration removes concerns about integration delays or securing development resources that are required even to make a small change. It also facilitates communication with the broader business. Identity teams no longer need to worry about internal selling a project with a presentation or business case to get executive approval. Instead, orchestration enables them to test new services efficiently and then show (not tell) the executives what the benefits are.

Developers & Architects

This audience cares about speed, efficiency, and scale. Their goal is repeatability and automation. Many developers experience an identity suite riddled with hardcoded rules and policies—also known as custom cement—that is difficult to change once implemented.

Identity orchestration provides a framework conducive to change and growth in a low-code/no-code manner while freeing up resources that could be better applied elsewhere. Organizations can onboard new applications, migrate user stores, and A/B test user experiences without overhauling their code. Orchestration empowers developers and architects with an integrated solution that is adaptive and scalable.

Leadership

Both business and technology leaders are now responsible for security. But the emphasis on security cannot come at the expense of revenue targets or user experience. Enterprise leaders can’t afford to neglect either as they push the boundaries of innovation.

Orchestration removes many technical obstacles from identity and makes its role much clearer to leadership. Now leaders can engage in conversations with identity, security, and developer teams by focusing on the user experience and business goals. They can test out the front-end user experience without having to worry about any of the backend hurdles.

Identity orchestration has vast potential. It has the capability to stretch beyond identity and tackle any type of workflow across different applications and services. However, there are four significant business challenges where orchestration is already gaining traction:

These business challenges have a couple of attributes in common:

1. They require a seamless user experience.
2. No single solution exists, but rather a combination of multiple technologies and vendors must be tightly integrated.
3. Nothing is set in stone—constant change and optimization are required.

Technology is a competitive advantage in the marketplace and as a result, it must be flexible to change. Orchestration enables businesses to adapt their technology to meet their user experience needs.

Passwordless

Perhaps the most effective way to deliver better security and a better experience to your users is via passwordless authentication. Users generally dislike entering passwords as it adds significant friction and frustration to the digital experience. Similarly, passwords come with weak security and remain a popular target for hackers.

Passwordless technology has evolved and is ready for mainstream adoption. However, organizations remain hesitant because of concerns about user rollout and ensuring coverage for all the different user scenarios and devices. But, orchestration provides a framework to deploy passwordless at scale with efficiency.

With an orchestration solution, organizations can easily test and optimize their passwordless rollout. Orchestration provides visibility into the actual user experience. You can also create rules and policies that support your unique user scenarios; for instance, rules for devices or backup authentication methods. Finally, you can integrate risk signaling to create a smarter, stronger, and more seamless authentication experience across the enterprise.

Registration

In the digital world, acquiring or converting a user often involves a registration flow or form. But, this ends up being a delicate double-edged sword. Why? When a customer shows interest in your brand, you want to be able to capture as much information as you can from them. 

However, if you make that process too long or arduous, there’s a good chance they will abandon you for a competitor that offers a better user experience. As a result, organizations are constantly seeking to improve their registration experience as efficiently as possible. Orchestration provides the tool to optimize registration experiences in a few ways. For instance, you can live A/B test different registration processes. You can collect conversion data to see where users are dropping off. And, you can integrate services that make registration easier like social login. 

To do this, you don’t have to collect all the user information at once, either. Instead, you can initiate ‘progressive profiling’ to collect information gradually. For instance, granting users access with limited information and asking for more information as they seek higher value services. The result is a more seamless user experience with more conversions and less friction.

Fraud Prevention

Fraud is on the rise and comes in many forms: malicious bots, identity theft, payments, etc. The negative impact on revenue for companies is significant. Fraud prevention is thus a crowded space with many vendors solving different pain points.

Typically, organizations are deploying multiple fraud vendors. But integrating them can be difficult. Organizations also lack visibility of where and when the fraud checks occur in the user journey. Most importantly, they want to deploy a fraud solution but do not want to introduce friction to the user experience.

With orchestration, organizations can integrate and adapt fraud prevention capabilities to the user experience. Orchestration offers visibility into where and when fraud checks occur in the user journey. In doing so, organizations can fight fraud while providing consistency in an online experience, wherein security is weaved in thoughtfully.

Zero Trust

The Zero Trust movement has gained traction to the point where many security leaders view it more as marketing jargon versus a reality that can be delivered. That’s because like the initiatives we’ve already covered, Zero Trust requires an orchestrated ecosystem of numerous vendors and solutions. Identity is a foundational aspect of Zero Trust as it’s essential first to authenticate the user and the device they’re using.

Identity orchestration can enable Zero Trust initiatives to finally reach their potential by allowing for closer coupling of various security technologies. This is because orchestration lets you see how the various tools—i.e., multi-factor authentication, mobile device management, network segmentation, authorization, etc.—are incorporated across the user journey. This enables organizations to identify what security gaps may exist, but also where there is too much security tooling in place.

User experience is one of the most overlooked aspects of Zero Trust. Organizations are investing in Zero Trust to combat modern threats and enable their business and increase productivity. By placing a greater emphasis on the user experience through identity orchestration, perhaps Zero Trust projects can finally reach their full potential.

Other User Experiences

Interactive Voice Response (IVR) & Helpdesk

Customers don’t enjoy calling helpdesks due to long wait times and the numerous steps required to verify their identity. Interactive Voice Response (IRV) offers a quick, automated way to authenticate a user and solve their inquiry. Identity orchestration ensures the right security checks are performed and can integrate numerous applications and services.

“Lazy” Migration

A common identity use case is organizations seeking to migrate users from a legacy, on-premise directory to a cloud directory. However, they don’t want to make a “big bang” migration that could cause downtime or potential errors at scale. With identity orchestration, enterprises can perform “just in time” (JIT) migration when a user logs in with zero downtime.

A/B Testing

We’ve discussed A/B testing related to other initiatives already, but it deserves to stand on its own—especially in a customer identity environment. Brands constantly seek to optimize their user experiences and need a quick way to test the user experience. With orchestration, organizations now have opportunities to test customer security experiences thoroughly.

Identity is synonymous with user experience. Delivering the best user experience will have immediate and lasting effects on your revenue. If you’re convinced and want to get started with an identity orchestration platform to optimize user experiences, there are many choices. Below are some of the important criteria to consider.

Open vs. Closed Platform

Do you prefer going all-in on one vendor or prefer a best-of-breed approach, where you can choose different vendors and capabilities? Some orchestration solutions are limited to the vendor’s suite of identity and security capabilities with the aim of offering a tightly integrated and controlled experience with pre-packaged workflows. Others provide an open approach, where you can integrate multiple vendors and may have to develop some workflows from scratch.

Low/No-Code vs. Custom Coding

The key to identity orchestration is the ease of integration. It should be easy. Easy to add new services and easy to make changes. During your evaluation process you must investigate how much coding is involved and the level of effort it will require from your development teams.

Number of Integrations

All orchestration solutions come with a certain number of pre-built integrations. Investigate how many of your applications and services are part of those integration directories. Also, understand how easy it will be to add critical services that are missing.

Testing

When done right, identity orchestration provides immediate and actionable insights into the user experience. You should be able to test that experience just like an actual user would be interacting with your site, even down to the look and feel. This is a critical aspect that will enable your identity and security teams to have better communication with the business.

Breadth and Depth

Understand the vision of the identity orchestration vendor and determine whether or not that’s in line with your goals around user experience. Some want to solve certain aspects of the user journey like authentication while others want to cover the entire journey. While you may have immediate requirements, a solution that can solve broader needs will have a more strategic impact both in the short-term and the long-term.

At Ping, we firmly believe that orchestration will usher in the next era in identity—one that centers around experience with a framework that makes it easy for organizations to integrate new products and services easily. Organizations can no longer debate how to balance security and experience. Instead they must deliver both consistently. And because orchestration offers an ease of integration, it must work across different technologies and ecosystems easily. Orchestration must be vendor agnostic and not centered around proprietary technologies.

To learn more about our solution, DaVinci, please visit our page.

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