Increasingly, businesses are diversifying their access and identity management strategies to improve security and embrace best practices for simplifying data access for relevant users. Microsoft Azure Active Directory (AD) B2C is emerging as the dominant platform for ID and access management modernization.
Table of Contents
In this blog we’ll explore…
- Why identity management is crucial to any enterprise’s success
- What’s special and powerful about Azure Active Directory B2C
- How Azure improves customer & partner experience
- How you can accelerate your identity management migration to Azure
Why Prioritize Access & ID Management?
The security of your customers’ data is key to your reputation and ability to do business. Without the right approach, it can feel like a lose-lose: If your security falters, you may never undo the damage to your company. If your data’s locked up so tightly it’s not accessible, doing business with you feels frustrating.
That situation encapsulates the challenges of the B2C space right now: You need customers to feel like they’re having a great experience and are fully safe in their capacity as your client. When you achieve both, you’ve established an experience that’s a true competitive differentiator.
While they sound more technical than exciting, ID and access management are actually the exact intersection of those key customer needs (security and experience). Walk them through their journey doing business with you in a way that feels light, personalized, and free from risk, and they’ll stick with you for a long time. Expose their data to risk in a way that makes it easy for everybody but them to get to it, and they’ll be running to the competition.
What Azure AD B2C Brings to the Table
There are three compelling reasons to upgrade your identity and access management strategy using Azure AD B2C right now:
- Improve Experience: Using Azure AD B2C, you can make accessing data much easier, direct, and more intuitive for customers and partners. They can access all their data, regardless of where it’s stored, using a single access credential, and you can keep their data secure without forcing them to re-enter login information repeatedly. That makes your business feel easy and rewarding to work with.
- Provide the Best Security: Azure AD B2C is specifically designed with identity protection in mind. Their application- or policy-based multi-factor authentication (MFA) means security is tighter than ever, even though relevant, appropriate access is simplified.
- Reduce Costs: Microsoft Azure is a vibrant cloud platform that’s still growing rapidly. That means you can trade the expense of maintaining your technical debt in for the opportunity to innovate and create new long-term value through efficiency.
How Azure Identity Management Improves Customer Experience
Azure AD B2C creates a straightforward, modern experience built on a data-driven understanding of what consumers need and expect. For example, login UIs are simplified, and you can easily enable social sign-in via channels like Facebook, Google, etc. to fully integrate the experience of being your client with the rest of your customers’ day-to-day lives.
Once that user has been logged in and authenticated, Azure AD B2C can leverage multi-factor authentication (MFA) to check in with customers at regular intervals to ensure ID authentication without putting them back through the repetitive password flow. In this way, MFA provides both an additional layer of security and an improvement to the user experience, sparing customers the frustration and repetition of repeat logins as they navigate from app to app without compromising the safety of their data.
The First Step to Securing & Accelerating ID Management
If you’re looking to upgrade and modernize your access and ID management strategy, the first step is to build a deep understanding of your current environment and goals. rSTAR can help you articulate an approach that works for your business at your scale and create a personalized Azure migration roadmap.
Once we’ve built a high-level understanding of your needs, we apply our proprietary Azure B2C Accelerator to automate the integration mapping. Our Accelerator streamlines project completion times more than 50% over industry average to keep costs well-scaled for you while still delivering a powerful, personalized solution. In this way, rSTAR offers a unique opportunity to maximize and optimize your migration to Azure AD B2C for ID and access management.
