This is the fourth and final article in my four-part series on how financial services organizations are relying on identity and access management (IAM) to ensure compliance with regulations and protect against data breach, while delivering exceptional user experiences and facilitating agility and innovation.

Do more, do it faster and do it better. The pressure successful organizations face in today's age of rapid technological advancements is unrelenting. If you work in financial services, you're no stranger to this reality. In fact, PwC's Global CEO Survey found that banking CEOs outnumber their peers in other industries when it comes to feeling the push to innovate, with four out of five expressing concern about the speed of technological change.

Your customers are only becoming more mobile and tech savvy, and nimble new competitors are catering to these connected consumers. When your only real options are leading the charge or at least keeping pace, you have little choice but to embrace innovation and agility. This means rapidly onboarding new apps and services to meet market demands. And increasingly, it means shifting from an adversarial relationship with the competition to a collaborative one. 

To compete, you must be able to quickly bring new applications and services to market. But enabling user access is challenging, especially when those apps reside both on-premises and in the cloud. Add new partners into the mix, plus acquired apps and extra engagement channels, and it becomes even more difficult to secure access.

Before we go too far down the rabbit hole, though, there is a solution. Identity and access management (IAM) enables you to control user access to resources and information seamlessly and securely. Imagine accelerating digital transformation to improve customer engagement and worker productivity, while simultaneously ensuring compliance and improving security. With IAM, you can literally do it all.

Highly Secure Access, Even in Hybrid Environments

While the cloud may be the ultimate goal, the reality for many financial organizations today is a hybrid environment of on-premises, cloud and SaaS applications. Yet many identity and access management solutions are poorly suited to this deployment model.

A financial-grade IAM solution enables you to manage access to all applications, no matter where they reside. It gives you the flexibility to choose the best IAM deployment model for your needs and supports your move to the cloud at your own pace.

A best-in-class solution will allow you to rapidly connect SaaS applications using modern standards, like SAML and OpenID Connect. It should also provide connectors and integration kits, so you can easily connect your legacy enterprise web applications.

Imagine enabling secure, seamless one-click access to all the apps your users want and need. An enterprise IAM solution can and should support this.

More Partners, Less Management & Risk

Not only do you have to give the right access to your employees and customers, but also to your growing ecosystem of partners, who are becoming more critical to delivering value to your customers. But managing partner identities has historically added a layer of burden to your IT team, not to mention increased security risk. Not so with the right identity and access management solution.

Your IAM solution should provide your partners' employees with single sign-on (SSO) access to your enterprise applications, as well as empower partners to manage their own identities, including onboarding, ongoing management and de-provisioning.

This doesn't just shift the responsibility off your IT department, but it puts it where it's best managed. Your partners have the greatest visibility into the comings, goings and access requirements of their employees. By giving them the power to maintain their own identities as part of their hiring and termination procedures, you reduce the risk that a former partner employee might still have access to your enterprise applications.

Staying at the forefront of technological advancements is critical to the continued success of your organization. As disruptive competitors lure your customers with better experiences and lower fees, your ability to be agile and innovative is more important than ever before. Identity and access management is ideally suited to the challenges you face today and flexible and scalable to handle whatever the future holds. 

Learn more about how IAM helps financial services organizations increase business agility and accelerate innovation.