By Kirsten Doyle

Cybersecurity is a challenge for entities in all sectors and employees of every type. In today's increasingly connected world, managing security is a Sisyphean task. It requires a ton of hard work and yet will never really be finished.

The gig economy has expanded the problem of enterprise information security beyond the traditional office. Platforms like Airbnb, Shopify, and Uber have introduced flexible work models, while many businesses now rely on freelancers and temporary staff. The bottom line is that with the ingress and egress of so many new people in companies each day, HR teams must find a way to verify that gig workers are who they claim to be.

The Rise of New Identity Categories

Today's distributed world has seen a slew of new identity categories arise.

Customers demand personalized experiences and frictionless access to purchases and support. Businesses strive to balance convenience and data privacy to meet their customers' demands. At every stage, there will be tradeoffs, but the experience must be seamless, frictionless, and secure to build and maintain trust.

Gig workers and partners also need access to resources on demand, often only temporarily. Here again, security and efficiency are critical.

Sprawling identities

Companies using traditional IAM systems have to manage a limited number of workers, all of whom are known to the business. They could manage up to thousands of employees using corporate accounts within a secured network surrounded by a firewall. This model was already proving to be a challenge with the surge in remote workers, but now that the number of users has gone up to hundreds of thousands, traditional IAM systems just do not scale up.

In today's gig economy, freelancers and contractors use their own accounts to create their identities in what's being dubbed a bring-your-own-identity (BYOI) phenomenon. Managing these identities is significantly more complex than managing identities within the business, and the vulnerabilities are practically limitless.

This perfect storm of factors means businesses need secure yet user-friendly Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions that have the flexibility to match gig workers' needs. Importantly, these solutions must strike the right balance between security and user experience.

The best IAM solutions minimize friction for users while still establishing the required levels of trust, as they protect valuable information assets while still enabling their workforces to use the resources and systems they need to do their jobs effectively.

Addressing Identity Sprawl

Customer IAM (CIAM) allows organizations to securely capture and manage external identities and their access to applications and services. CIAM helps to safeguard data privacy and protect against identity theft and other types of fraud and misconduct. Moreover, they enable users to independently manage their account profiles and security settings. While CIAM systems were born out of the need to manage the scale of customer/consumer identities, they're turning out to be a better fit for other identities like partners, suppliers, or gig workers.

CIAM makes it simple for businesses to add user registration functions, strong authentication, and access controls to customer-facing apps. It also enables businesses to obtain user consent for data processing, giving customers more control over their data and privacy. This helps enhance customer experience (CX), bolster security, and ensure compliance with data privacy regulations. CIAM solutions are usually delivered via the cloud, hosted and managed by a third-party security provider to ensure flexibility and scalability.

Social login is another way businesses are facilitating seamless access for customers. Also known as social sign-in or social authentication, social login is a mechanism that allows users to log in to a website or application using their existing social media credentials, such as those from Facebook, Google, Twitter, or LinkedIn, instead of creating a new account with a separate username and password.

By streamlining this process, there's no longer a need to remember multiple passwords, and manual data entry has been eliminated. This enhances the UX, leading to higher engagement and satisfaction. It also provides access to user data for personalization and targeted marketing, reduces password fatigue, and enhances perceived security through trusted social media platforms and additional security features like two-factor authentication.

On the downside, social login collects many customer data points, such as likes, check-ins, and other interactions. Not all customers are happy trading personal information for the convenience of frictionless login.

The Need for Identity Governance

With identity sprawl becoming a real issue, Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) helps security administrators to effectively manage workforce identities and access within an organization. It provides increased insight and visibility into identity and access privileges, facilitating the implementation of necessary controls to mitigate inappropriate or dangerous access.

The typical JML (joiner, mover, leaver) processes have worked really well for large organizations with tens of thousands of employees. Traditional IGA solutions, however, were built with a very workforce-centric view. Gig workers and other third-party users (like partners or suppliers) tend to have very different needs. Identity verification for a gig worker, for instance, cannot happen at the office and is likely to happen remotely as part of the onboarding process. Similarly, being true to their nature, gig workers need to be offboarded quickly as well. A typical example is that of seasonal workers working at a factory or warehouse.

Identity administration for partners, suppliers, and distributors can be even more complex. These external users need to have the authority or be delegated to manage the identities of users inside their organizations. Imagine an insurance broker defining the identities of its own employees to gain access to the systems of the insurance company. A CIAM solution or a more specialized B2B IAM solution can help organizations address such complex identity administration challenges.

The Workforce of the Future

In the evolving workforce landscape, freelance workers who are sourced globally for short-term projects will complete for an increasing number of jobs remotely. As the industry anticipates this shift, gaining insights from successful practices in the access management sphere is crucial. Doing so provides a solid foundation for devising IAM solutions for the workforce that are adaptable to a wide range of employment structures.

The battle between security and experience rages on. Too much security will kill experience and turn loyal customers into disgruntled visitors looking for another, more friendly competitor. Eliminating friction in the user experience will adversely affect security, invite bad actors in, and ultimately damage the brand. Looking at the future of identity, evolving technologies, such as passkeys, consent management, biometric identification, and societal shifts, will shape how individuals interact with and safeguard their digital identities.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kirsten Doyle has been in the technology journalism and editing space for nearly 24 years, during which time she has developed a great love for all aspects of technology, as well as words themselves. Her experience spans B2B tech, with a lot of focus on cybersecurity, cloud, enterprise, digital transformation, and data centers. Her specialties are in news, thought leadership, features, white papers, and PR writing, and she is an experienced editor for both print and online publications. She is also a regular writer at Bora.