Choosing a Customer Identity Solution: Should You Build or Buy?

So, your organization has finally decided that it needs a new dedicated solution for customer identity. Having made this decision, you’re immediately confronted with another: do you build that solution yourself or buy one from an identity management provider?

The right choice will be different for every organization and it will require you to take a close, honest look at your needs and capabilities.

We know it can be a difficult decision to make, which is why we’ve put together this blog to help you navigate the process.

Read on for an overview of your main options, plus the pros and cons of each approach.

As you consider how to address your customer identity needs, your first port of call might be your existing enterprise identity and access management (IAM) solution. If you have a solution that’s already delivering on your workforce identity requirements, then it might seem like a no-brainer to extend it to address your customer identity needs, too.

If your requirements for customer identity are minimal, your enterprise identity solution may be up to the task. However, after closer evaluation, most organizations often find that this isn’t the case.

The problem? Traditional identity security solutions were designed for workforce applications where the main goal of the system was to protect enterprise data and manage internal access. And since these systems were built for non-customer applications and use cases, they usually don’t accommodate critical customer identity features such as self-service registration and account management, social registration and login, or storing rich customer profiles.

These solutions may also struggle to deal with demand spikes when large numbers of customers are logging in simultaneously. Most businesses have more customers than employees, and the difference can be several orders of magnitude. So, your enterprise IAM solution is unlikely to scale reliably when it needs to support traffic it wasn’t originally designed to handle.

Enterprise identity management also has little regard for customer experience. The features you consider to be “nice-to-haves” for your workforce are absolute “must-haves” for your customer use cases. Remember, while your employees will usually forgive you for clunky identity experiences, your customers have much higher expectations—and, in most cases, extending an enterprise IAM solution won’t be enough to meet them.

At first glance, building your own customer identity solution may look like an attractive option, especially if you have developer resources in-house. You can create only what you need, seamlessly integrate it with what you have, and provide whatever support is required. However, once you’ve decided to take up the challenge of building a customer identity solution, you’ll soon find that it’s a lot harder than it looks.

Architecting a homegrown solution is a massive undertaking that demands lots of time and developer resources. The protocols and specifications required to implement IAM properly are extremely complex, because they need to support a vast breadth of uses cases. Building a production-quality IAM solution can drastically add to the time and effort of managing your systems and slow down the pace at which you can get new products to market.

It just doesn’t make sense to reinvent the wheel or try to fit a square peg in a round hole when you have the option of using an integrated customer identity platform instead.

With a purpose-built solution that’s designed specifically for the requirements of customer identity—and developed by identity experts who’ve spent decades getting it right—it’s much easier to deliver the seamless and secure digital experiences your customers demand.

When you buy a proven customer identity platform, you get access to powerful capabilities, such as:

• No-code identity orchestration to design seamless customer experiences.

   

• Enterprise-grade authentication for single sign-on.

   

• Adaptive multi-factor authentication (MFA) with support for multiple authentication options, including passwordless.

   

• Online fraud detection to detect and mitigate fraud across every channel.

   

• Regulatory compliance and consent management.

   

• Ability to scale to meet peak demand

   

• Custom apps for complex enterprise use cases.

Opting for a tried-and-tested CIAM solution provides an enterprise with bigger benefits than a homegrown approach. Here are the top three reasons why that’s the case.

It Leads to a Better Customer Experience

Identity underpins critical customer interactions: account creation, login, multi-channel personalization and more. Customers expect all of these processes to be as smooth, seamless, and simple as possible–and it’s much easier for you to deliver on these demands with a proven identity management platform.

Leading CIAM platforms are dedicated to supporting frictionless experiences for end users. Ping Identity solutions, for instance, weave together out-of-the-box capabilities like authentication, user management and multi-factor authentication to delight customers without sacrificing security.

It Ensures a More Secure System

When you buy, the security you need is baked-in and well-established. In choosing a CIAM solution, you benefit from leveraging the skills and expertise of an identity vendor to secure your customer experience, rather than developers who aren’t as experienced in identity.

The right CIAM solution will give your users secure access to the right applications, step up security when necessary for high-risk situations, and securely manage identity and profile data at scale. It can even encompass API security to help you address the growing threats posed by the ever-growing API ecosystem.

It Helps You Move Faster

Purchasing a CIAM solution that leverages a no-code identity orchestration engine to build, test, and optimize will help your organization reduce development time and get your digital experiences to market faster. The drag-and-drop canvas makes it simple to visualize customer workflows while abstracting away the complexity of integrations with out-of-the-box connections so your teams can build customer experiences without having to develop and maintain code.

It Helps Future-Proof Identity Management

Buying a CIAM solution allows you to future-proof your identity initiatives in multiple ways:

• You keep up with changing standards. New industry standards like FIDO2 are improving authentication security, while organizations like NIST are routinely updating best practices for IAM. Identity experts pay close attention to these changes, with solutions based on open standards that ensure secure interoperability now and in the future.

   

• Your identity landscape scales as you grow. When you choose to work with a trusted identity services provider, those services will scale with you as you grow. Here at Ping, for example, we publish the scale and performance benchmarks our enterprise customers achieve, demonstrating that our solutions can handle peak user demand spikes, balance horizontal and vertical scaling, and provide instant access to customer data—all while meeting our customers’ SLAs.

   

• You ease regulatory compliance. The data privacy landscape already involves navigating complex regulations like GDPR and CCPA—and there’s even more proposed legislation on the horizon. Ping has the expertise that can help you flexibly build and enforce policies to meet existing requirements, while also complying with future legislation.

As a general rule, it makes sense to let your business focus on what it does best and find the right partners to handle the rest. At Ping, identity is our complete focus, so it doesn’t have to be yours. Our mission is to keep your enterprise and customers secure and to help you enable great digital experiences. Our track record of success on that front speaks for itself.

PingOne for Customers is a customer identity solution that leverages our no-code orchestration platform for building, testing, and optimizing exceptional digital experiences. To learn how it can deliver on your customer identity needs, visit our website.