New research shows that both the lines of business and IT departments see value in “Bring Your Own Identity” (BYOID) initiatives, where social networking or digital IDs are used for application login.
The groups also agree that more security is needed to increase BYOID adoption. The report, “The Identity Imperative for the Open Enterprise 2014,” conducted by the Ponemon Institute and CA Technologies, examines business user and IT department attitudes toward BYOID.
“In today’s application-driven economy, access to applications has to be simple and secure. BYOID is an increasingly popular option for simplifying access. It can reduce the need to create new accounts for every site, which leads to registration fatigue and abandoned shopping carts,” said Vic Mankotia, Vice President – Solution strategy, Asia Pacific & Japan, CA Technologies. “We are working to make sure we enhance BYOID security without adding friction or complexity.”
The report, which also covers two key Asia Pacific countries, India and Australia, provided several key insights into BYOID, including the current state of adoption, its perceived value, views toward the identity providers and how BYOID could be enhanced.
Current State
BYOID deployment using social IDs is still in its infancy, but interest is high, especially for mobile and web customer populations. There is a high level of interest in BYOID and using social identities such as Facebook, LinkedIn or Yahoo, with 50 percent of IT and 63 percent of business users globally expressing high or very high interest. Customers engaging with the business via the Web and mobile device were highest rated for targeted digital identity engagement, eclipsing other populations such as job recruits, employees, contractors and retirees.
Perceived Value
Identity is now viewed as a contributing growth asset as well as a security component. Both IT and business users agreed that an important reason for BYOID adoption in their organization was to achieve a stronger identity credential and get a higher level of confidence (69 percent and 65 percent respectively) especially in India where 72 percent of business users feel this way. But business users cited capturing attributes about users as the biggest benefit (95 percent). This indicates an evolving view of identity. No longer viewed as simply a component for protecting data, identity is now seen as a value asset that can provide data which could drive incremental revenue and help maintain customers.
Enhancing BYOID
Additional security developments could drive increased BYOID adoption. The majority of IT and Business users globally said “identity validation processes” would help increase BYOID adoption (72 percent and 70 percent respectively). Implementing fraud risk engines also rated among the top three across both groups. In India, business users feel that simplified user registration would help the most (76 percent). Interestingly only 27 percent of business respondents globally believed formal accreditation of the identity provider was very important / essential, while 59 percent of IT users believe formal accreditation is very important / essential.
Perception of Identity Providers
Respondents’ preferred identity provider varied based on the situation and region. When asked what social ID was of most interest to their organisation IT users ranked PayPal as the preferred identity provider across all regions. Business user responses varied with Amazon edging out PayPal and Microsoft. However, business users in India ranked Microsoft Live and Yahoo highest. When asked what social ID respondents preferred as a consumer, Google was highest ranked among both IT users and business users but in India, Facebook was the provider of choice for business users.