Three ways Customer Identity supports data compliance and security

Website logins. Mobile apps. Customer support portals. Chat. Digitizing the user experience means most companies have vast amounts of data on their clients, collected across multiple channels and stored in different systems.

Depending on the jurisdiction, industry, or type of data, your organization must comply with many regulations governing data collection, privacy, storage, usage, and management. Beyond regulatory requirements, today's customers expect control over how companies use their data and the ability to withdraw consent anytime, for some or all uses.

All of these demands are immensely difficult to balance. Regulations are constantly changing, and interpreting requirements and best practices isn't straightforward. And if you're building Identity into every app, portal, or website, it's harder to keep all data points associated with the right person and protected from potential attacks.

If you can't correlate Customer Identity, you can't track it effectively across systems and channels, which makes it difficult to comply with data privacy and protection laws. A customer who provides a phone number for a callback on a support line will lose trust in your brand if they start receiving marketing text messages. And you could face compliance fines on top of everything else.

Enter Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM). CIAM manages and controls access to your applications, web portals, and web services, and it can help you achieve compliance in three key ways.

1. Authenticate user identities/identifiers:Authentication (through social logins, MFA, passkeys, or some other method) confirms that the users signing up and logging in to accounts or completing sensitive transactions are who they say they are. Authentication can also verify the validity of their identifiers, such as their email or phone number. This prevents bad actors from accessing sensitive information while improving data quality.
2. Authorizes users for the right level of access:By leveraging access controls that consider roles, user attributes, and relationships, you can assign granular permissions or restrict access to resources within your application. For instance, account owners may have elevated permissions, such as the ability to modify account settings, while sub-users have more limited access.
3. Allow customers and administrators to centrally manage Identity:Administrators can update user access permissions and implement security policies to consistently control and protect user data, no matter what channel the customer logged in on. It also offers customers the opportunity to manage their own identities, data, and preferences where appropriate or required by regulations.

How Okta simplifies compliance through extensibility

Like many CIAM solutions, Okta Customer Identity Cloud maintains and meetsthe requirements for multiple compliance frameworks and certifications. However, Okta uniquely enables you to extend and customize Identity to better understand your customers and their needs while boosting cybersecurity and operational efficiency.

Okta Customer Identity Cloud is built for adaptability. Your developers can quickly update and customize login and signup flows to meet evolving market, customer, or regulatory requirements without writing and maintaining custom code.

Identity is the only technology that needs to connect to every part of an organization's tech stack to orchestrate, protect, and govern access. And because your tech stack and business needs are constantly evolving, so are Identity requirements.

Okta's highly extensible architecture makes it easier to orchestrate complex Identity workflows across multiple parts of an organization's ecosystem. For example, you can extend authentication flows with any of the hundreds of out-of-the-box partner integrations available on our Marketplace, including consent management systems, fraud prevention platforms, and more. Post-authentication, you can automate downstream actions by integrating with systems of record, such as CRM or customer data platforms(CDPs).

For more information on meeting your unique Identity needs with Okta, visit our Customer Identity Cloud Extensibilitypage.

These materials and any recommendations within are not legal, privacy, security, compliance, or business advice. These materials are intended for general informational purposes only and may not reflect the most current security, privacy, and legal developments nor all relevant issues. You are responsible for obtaining legal, security, privacy, compliance, or business advice from your own lawyer or other professional advisor and should not rely on the recommendations herein. Okta is not liable to you for any loss or damages that may result from your implementation of any recommendations in these materials. Okta makes no representations, warranties, or other assurances regarding the content of these materials. Information regarding Okta's contractual assurances to its customers can be found at okta.com/agreements.

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