Top 10 Identity Management Capabilities for Media & Comms

Like other rapidly evolving digital businesses, communication and media firms need a modern approach to ensure flexibility, transparency, and scalability of their multi-channel offerings. Legacy identity systems cannot seamlessly connect users, devices, and cloud services; leading to a disjointed customer experience and limiting opportunities to capitalize on the rise of IoT. Not to mention, the mobile user.

Communications and Media
Advanced identity management capabilities will be key to digital transformation for communications and media firms.

For media and communications firms working toward successful digital transformations, these 10 identity management capabilities are essential. Some will be familiar, some completely new.

The Access Management Basics – without these, you’re behind the curve.

1. Single Sign On (SSO) - Frictionless login across applications is fast becoming an industry standard, so if you don’t have it there is a risk of perceived lack of trust and credibility.

2. Federation - Why do your customers have to log in to their mobile phone app differently than how they log in to their smart TV? Take your SSO capabilities across cloud and mobile devices and applications creating a unified customer experience, regardless of channel.

3. Advanced Authentication - It shouldn’t be hard to be your customer. With fine-grained authentication, you can set up dozens of authentication combinations such as fingerprint, Open ID, push authentication or one-time password your customers will stay your customers.

Advanced Identity Management - some of these could give you a competitive advantage

4. Adaptive Authentication - Adaptive authentication and authorization enables decisions regarding permission and entitlement to be made in context, throughout the customer journey (not just at the start). This helps improve security, while at the same time making customer journeys more intuitive. When customers notice you being subtly attentive, it builds trust in you and your brand.
 
5. Progressive Registration and Consent - Avoid ‘registration fatigue’ by gathering information about a user over time, rather than requiring them to enter registration all in one go. It’s about thinking things through from the customer’s viewpoint, and establishing a ‘minimal viable profile’ that you need to engage with them. In this way, you improve the user experience, making it more ‘conversational’ and engaging in approach. 

6. Push Authentication and Push Authorization - Push Authentication provides secure notifications to mobile phones asking the user to approve login attempts with a simple swipe or using Touch ID, allowing for passwordless logins and easy-to-use multi-factor authentication. These techniques can be great for your user experience, eliminating the need for username and password, and helping to combat identity theft.

7. Device Fingerprinting - An important tool when seeking to remove friction from customer engagement processes, e.g. by maintaining sessions for known/assured combinations of user + device, but also important commercially where content distribution contracts require restriction to a limited number of devices per user for example.

Identity Relationship Management – What the thought leaders are up to

8. User Managed Access - Allow your customers to view and manage their own data for privacy and consent purposes: to see what information is held, manage consent for its use, enable it to be shared with 3rd parties, and ultimately delete or port it somewhere else. An essential capability for customer-centric organizations in the GDPR era.               

9. Identity Relationship Modeling - Understanding identity relationships will enhance your user experience, and unlock entirely new ways of engaging with your customers. It will set you apart in the market, and enable new monetization models relating to communities of people and their things.
 
10. Identity Management of Devices, Things and Services - Don’t limit yourself by thinking identity is just about people; it’s also about their relationship to the devices and connected things that they use, and the services they consume. Think connected cars, connected homes and IoT ecosystems - all being monetized in new and innovative ways such as targeted advertising to audiences of one, through ‘Identity aware’ companion devices.