As organisations drive more of their business through digital channels, it is becoming critical to move beyond the security focus of first-generation customer identity and access management (CIAM) solutions. Enterprises instead need to create a holistic view of each customer that extends across their business systems in order to drive rich, secure and personalised digital experiences. WSO2 delivers on the promise of this next-level CIAM with the latest release of the Asgardeo identity as a service (IDaaS), which adds integration to Choreo, WSO2’s digital platform as a service (digital PaaS).
The new Asgardeo version also builds on the cloud platform’s extensive business-to-consumer (B2C) capabilities by adding robust business-to-business (B2B) support through new B2B organisation management functionality.
Both Asgardeo and Choreo abstract away the complexity of Kubernetes, so development teams can focus on the business logic of the digital experiences they are delivering. This aligns with the priorities of enterprises surveyed for recent research undertaken by WSO2 in the United Kingdom and Ireland (UK&I). Among respondents surveyed, 76% state that developers at their organisation could be more productive if they didn’t have to spend so much time dealing with IAM and CIAM issues. The study points to a growing adoption of software as a service (SaaS) to free often-understaffed development teams from managing the underlying infrastructure so they can focus on innovating new digital services and applications that deliver business value.
Enabling CIAM Beyond Access Management
Together, WSO2’s Asgardeo and Choreo cloud solutions enable enterprises to go beyond access management and authentication to integrate customers’ identities into every business system and build rich personality profiles of users in order to personalise each customer’s experience.
Asgardeo enables developers without security expertise to easily embed advanced CIAM features—such as access management, federated single sign-on (SSO), social login support, multifactor authentication (MFA), privacy and consent management, among others—into their apps within minutes. The IDaaS offers built-in CIAM best practices and workflows via templates and other no-code/low-code options.
Choreo is a full lifecycle cloud native platform that enables developers to quickly create, collaborate on, reuse, deploy and run new digital components—such as APIs, microservices, automations and integrations—in hours or days. It provides hundreds of templated integrations, including connections to commonly used customer relationship management (CRM), marketing, and business applications. Choreo also offers both code and low-code approaches for developers to programmatically extend integrations to legacy, non-standard, cloud, or software as a service (SaaS) applications, as well as orchestrate flows as needed.
Now, through the integration of Asgardeo with Choreo, developers can build personalised and secure customer experiences within hours by integrating multiple services or applications where users’ business profiles and interaction data are managed and exposing that data as APIs for the application as well as for the login and registration flows served by Asgardeo.
Additionally, when a customer registers, logs in or updates their user profile, Asgardeo sends pre- and post-event flows to Choreo, where a developer can easily integrate various business services and applications to propagate those state changes or initiate an action. For example, if a user updates their consent preferences to opt-in to marketing emails, Asgardeo notifies Choreo, which will then update relevant marketing systems to include the customer in email nurture campaigns. A developer can also update the user profile, account status, security settings and risk factors in Asgardeo based on the user interactions happening in various other services.
Extending CIAM from B2C to B2B
As organisations expand their online presence, they are exploring new ways to ensure a secure, frictionless customer experience (CX)—whether reaching these customers via B2C or B2B models. The new release of Asgardeo builds on its extensive B2C functionality by adding a new B2B organisation management feature that provides robust support for B2B scenarios.
Unlike other CIAM products that are limited to simple organisation management, the B2B organisation management in Asgardeo handles complex nesting, which gives enterprises the flexibility to:
- Define as many organisations and multiple levels of sub-organisations as needed to represent large enterprise customers and their hierarchical organisation structures, each of which get their own secure space for managing user identities and their access privileges.
- Define multi-level delegated administration policies for organisations, so they can manage their own user identities and access privileges.
- Enable each organisation to manage its own role-based access controls to restrict access to its resources.
- Define organisations for intermediaries in distribution channels, such as resellers and distributors, and allow them to define their own security policies and operational workflows for customer onboarding, log-in, branding, and adaptive authentication to manage their enterprise customers.
Geethika Cooray, vice president and general manager of identity and access management at WSO2, said, “Increasingly, enterprises that have successfully used CIAM to build trusted relationships with consumers now seek to make CIAM a cornerstone for delivering rich, personalised experiences to all customers,” “The latest release of our Asgardeo IDaaS uniquely empowers these organisations to realise their goals by making the next level of CIAM a reality via integration with Choreo and adding the industry’s most robust support for B2B organisation management.”
