How IAM Empowers a Digital Transformation Strategy

Whether to deliver a better customer experience or to improve productivity, digital transformation integrates technology into all areas of the business to help achieve these types of goals. This article describes how a dedicated, modern IAM solution empowers a successful digital transformation strategy. 

Digital Transformation Overview

The Covid-19 pandemic forced the global adoption of remote work and its associated tools, such as VPN and remote desktop protocol. Digital transformation initiatives accelerated for many businesses who may have harbored ambitions to facilitate remote work, but not at such speed. 

A 2019 Accenture report found that companies that lag behind in digital transformation initiatives can expect to miss out on 46 percent of potential annual revenue by 2023. Leaders in digital transformation adopt technological innovations such as containers, microservices architectures, cloud computing, and AI-driven solutions. 

Digital transformation leads to fundamental shifts in how businesses operate and how they provide value to customers. There is also a necessary cultural shift that entails challenging the established legacy technologies that power business activities and experimenting with new ways of thinking and doing. This essential cultural shift must begin with the business leader who is most important in driving digital transformation; typically, this is the CIO. 

Digital Transformation Examples

Companies lagging behind in their transformation strategy can take inspiration from some examples of the types of initiatives and outcomes digital transformation can lead to, such as:

• Using a single password solution for frictionless employee access to business applications, which improves productivity. Employees spend less time resetting passwords, and IT helpdesks spend less time dealing with these requests. 
• Implementing IoT devices in supply chains to provide analytics and decision-making power that can improve inventory management, increase transparency, and lead to better customer experiences with last-mile delivery optimization. 
• Using technology solutions powered by machine learning to improve decision support, provide recommendations, and automate manual processes. 
• Migrating a core legacy business application, such as your ERP or CRM, to the cloud for better flexibility and scalability. 
• Using intelligent chatbots to provide 24/7 customer service availability and answers to common questions.

These examples represent just a small sample of what’s possible. When businesses define goals or problem statements that digital technology can help achieve and solve and they take steps to implement new solutions, rapid changes can happen that lead to a competitive advantage.  

The Role of IAM in Digital Transformation

Whether your business wants to prioritize the delivery of new customer experiences or a better internal user experience, proper identity management is central to secure and successful digital initiatives for businesses of all sizes. 

Returning to the pandemic’s somewhat forced digital transformation initiatives around facilitating remote work, cybersecurity risks increased dramatically in this landscape. Attackers sought to compromise insecure implementations of corporate VPNs and cloud applications. Many attackers were successful—a 2020 Malwarebytes report found that remote work led to security breaches at 20 percent of organizations. 

If digital transformation strategies happen quickly, they need security baked in from the design stage. A robust IAM solution facilitates the adoption of new technology without compromising security. IAM systems help control access to enterprise resources so that the right people have the right levels of access at all times. 

IAM Digital Transformation Benefits

Some important benefits provided by modern IAM solutions to digital transformation initiatives include:

• Secure Access: Whether customers need to log in to access a customer-facing service or employees need to get authenticated to newly cloud-based business applications, modern IAM systems can provide secure access using features such as multi-factor authentication or risk-based access decisions. 
• Automation: Automating business operations is an example of a digital transformation goal. Modern IAM solutions can automate the provisioning and de-provisioning of user accounts using intelligent machine-learning and analytics-driven approaches. This automation can cover the entire user lifecycle, which removes manual inefficiencies while reducing the risk of orphaned accounts.
• Support for Cloud Strategies:  Cloud strategies feature prominently in the digital transformation strategies of most businesses. A modern IAM solution facilitates access control for both on-premise and cloud applications so that you can benefit from the cloud’s numerous advantages without compromising data security. 
• Workforce Benefits: While securing access is one part of IAM, providing seamless access in a way that benefits the workforce is critical for digital transformation. A modern IAM solution supports increased employee productivity through one-click access to resources across your IT environment, contextual MFA requests, and self-service password resets. 

The empowering nature of IAM is that it reduces the complexity of implementing digital transformation solutions, reduces the risk of project failure, avoids unnecessary expenses, and supports the goals of digital transformation initiatives without compromising security.  

How Tuebora Helps

Tuebora’s IAM system empowers your digital transformation strategy. Our solution is designed using a micro-services approach so that you can augment or replace legacy systems using only the services you need. The tenets of Tuebora are flexibility, simplicity, efficiency, and cloud-ready. You get single-sign-on support for frictionless access while a machine-learning engine efficiently provisions and governs access. 

Get your demo today.