IAM is ready to drive the business—and revenue

Identity and access management (IAM) has evolved significantly from its origins in the early 2000s ... and now it's taking more leaps forward.

One example is the evolution of identity analytics as a core function, which is opening up new revenue streams and improving user experiences. This is one reason the identity analytics market is expected to reach $3.62 billion by 2025, growing at a CAGR of 27.8% from 2018 to 2025.

Some enterprises are adopting identity analytics along with new technologies like blockchain, which generates improved secure digital identities throughout the verification process. In addition, privacy-preserving features like self-sovereign identity can now empower users to select and share identifiable information about themselves to connected service providers.

Enhancing security

These technologies help eliminate the need for users, including customers, to remember multiple credentials, which can be a security problem. Instead, users can now opt to use biometrics to authenticate and to authorize into services and service providers. This, in turn, enables providers to collect information about behaviors to improve user experiences and develop new services that can provide new sources of revenue.

New identity governance and administration (IGA) technologies also enable identity and access analytics to provide rich insight into user risk profiles, while identifying gaps such as over provisioning and access creep. Taking advantage of these insights to automate high-confidence access verification and low-confidence access removal can help save significant time and effort and reduce operational costs. According one estimate, a 10,000-employee company can save $3.5 million over three years through automated provisioning alone, with an estimated ROI of 300%.

Individualized customer experience and customer stickiness

Loyalty program management traditionally has been very complex to manage. With blockchain and a modern IGA solution, the middleman is eliminated, and the enterprise achieves a seamless user experience across the entire partner ecosystem. This improves user stickiness and provides enterprises access to richer user transactional data, which also can be used to create more meaningful and relevant client services and experiences.

Extended employee ecosystems

In addition to cost reduction and manual effort, artificial intelligence and machine learning are driving benefits that include the decentralization of user access administration. In essence, it is offloading user lifecycle management to connected partners, helping to reduce manual effort and risk.

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Best practices

IAM best practices include but are not limited to adopting standards-based services for identity management; using access management to reduce expensive customizations and complex integrations; and adopting software-as-a-service services to reduce capital and operational expenses and to eliminate expensive upgrades and platform changes.

The future is bright if digital transformation is on your roadmap

As many enterprises adopt more cloud solutions, it has become more important to have business, technology and security alignment to drive enterprise value and revenue, reduce cost and meet stakeholder expectations. Thus, IAM will also play a key role in governing, managing risk and compliance in cloud, as well as driving business growth. Learn more about our digital identity services at www.accenture.com/digitalidentity.

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