Today’s business landscape is constantly evolving and sometimes faster than we predicted. With economic, political and healthcare changes across the globe, businesses have to be agile and efficient to remain competitive.
Digital transformation is no longer a question of if businesses should go digital - it’s a question of how they manage this journey. With digitalization come a host of other systems that cannot be ignored. One of these is user management.
What is user management?
User management is the way in which companies or IT administrators manage access to various (most often engineering) resources within a company. In its broader sense it is also a framework in which data is collected, stored and accessed. This means that each user has a unique digital identity that must be established, maintained securely and monitored by the enterprise.
As technology evolves, businesses have to gear up to authenticate users and permit access only where appropriate. With fraudulent actors developing sophisticated methods to compromise systems, allowing access to genuine users is key to reducing this vulnerability.
Moreover, with most users accessing tools and platforms remotely, an effective identity and user management system is required for businesses. For companies that are accelerating their digitization efforts, this can help them simplify the user’s access workflow, reduce the risk of fraudulent actors, and build stronger security and data privacy.
What are the risks businesses face without this?
Without strong control over user access, companies run the risk of both external and internal security breaches. In most cases, the more user data a business has control and access to - the higher the risk.
This forces companies to implement high data storage and maintenance costs. But that’s where things get difficult. Strictly controlling user access across several systems and tools can be cumbersome.
Sometimes, IT professionals may lack enough capacity to build a more secure environment. This gives way to weak user management - where they may grant access to people without the right authorization.
Where digital identity can help
Digital identity includes multiple data points mapped to an individual that can grant them access to devices, roles and platforms. When a user verifies their identity remotely using a digital identity solution, it tells the system that the person is who they claim to be.
For a business, this is vital to building security and trust within their community. A lot of this relies on strong customer-centric security. Be it quicker onboarding, customer success or retention - all of this ties back to trust in the system. This is where identity and user management come into play.
