What is digital identity management? How to gain customer trust

Understand what is Digital Identity Management is based on: it is a tool that strengthens customers’ trust in your organization.

With proper digital identity management, you can improve your customers’ and users’ experience, increase the productivity of your teams and boost sales of your products and services.

In addition, accurate Digital Identity (DI) management protects an organization, its users and customers from potential cyber threats, which are one of the major challenges of the digitalized society.

In this article, we will take a closer look at what digital identity management is and how it can help you build customer trust.

What is digital identity management?

Digital identity management is the efficient storage, management and monitoring of information that uniquely and non-transferably represents and characterizes a person or organization and determines the level of privileges in a system.

Through this process, private access to specific applications, services or information can be provided on the basis of their digital identity, which is like an online extension of their physical identity.

Identity management is thus a critical component of digital security, where tools such as access control become indispensable.

Why is digital identity management important?

The importance of digital identity management lies in the fact that it can be used to ensure that only certain people or entities have access to certain applications, data or environments.

On the other hand, digital identity management is an ally in protecting the digital privacy of your users, in addition to facilitating the automation of tasks related to user accounts according to the role they have been assigned in the system.

This is the case, for example, with the automation of access control processes, particularly with regard to the renewal of passwords or the restriction to certain components of a section, providing people with an immediate, effective and reliable response.

Users identify themselves and access the resources they need to do their jobs effectively according to their responsibilities.

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In other words, their role within the organization or their level of relationship with the organization in the case of customers, determines the information access privileges that each of them has.

It should also be noted that digital identity and access management are closely related. As a result, the security of an organization’s operations is strengthened against cyber threats such as identity theft, theft of sensitive information, ransomware or phishing.

Optimal digital identity management not only increases the security of an organization’s technologies, but also improves the user/customer experience, which has a positive impact on the productivity of your teams and the sales of your commercial offerings.

5 digital identity management steps to gain customer trust

Gaining the trust of your customers requires digital identity management that meets their expectations.

To put it into practice, you need to consider the 5 steps detailed below.

Identify and grant access

System administrators must provide their customers with an Identity and Access Management (IAM) solution that allows them to create their digital identity in the system, i.e. their unique identification.

Depending on the users’ roles, they will enjoy different privileges and access rights.

Some of the components of the digital identity for identifying the person can be an email or a customer number, among others.

Authentication

Once the customer already has a digital identity, when they want to access a particular content or their private space, they need to authenticate themselves with the credentials that correspond to that identity.

The combination of different access credentials improves the security of systems. For example, biometrics (known as an inherent factor, i.e. based on a user attribute) and multi-factor authentication via password and security token can be required.

Authorization

The third step is access authorization, once the digital identity and the privileges associated with its role have been verified according to company policy and the nature of the exchange with the customer.

In this way, the system uniquely identifies who the customer is and what they can do once identified.

Lifecycle management

At the risk of being repetitive, we want to emphasize that security is the ultimate goal of digital identity management, allowing you to gain the trust of your customers. To achieve this, maintenance is essential.

This means that you should periodically review the permissions and roles within the system and verify that you are in compliance with privacy regulations.

It is also important to disable obsolete profiles to avoid security vulnerabilities.

Continuous auditing

To validate that you are always in compliance with cybersecurity standards, a necessary factor in digital business transformation, it is imperative that you implement audit protocols throughout the lifecycle of your access control system, both in your on-premises environments and in the cloud.

This will allow you to detect suspicious session attempts or security breaches that may increase the vulnerability in computer security.

At Smowltech, we understand the importance of security in building a relationship of trust with your customers and users.

That is why our proctoring plans offer the latest innovations in online monitoring and control, while allowing you to comply with current data protection regulations.

Request a free demo and discover the endless possibilities you can customize to protect your users and your brand’s credibility.

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