Deloitte is trying to raise awareness about digital identity best practices while simultaneously calling attention to some of the main challenges facing businesses and other large organizations. The company notes that many organizations are still utilizing out of date legacy technology, and that those organizations will need to overcome institutional inertia in order to protect themselves and their customers.

“In a digital economy, identity is a point of trust and an index of customer satisfaction,” said Deloitte & Touche cyber technology, media, and telecom leader David Mapgaonkar. “Organizations should think about consumer and enterprise identity management to create better outcomes. It requires managing relationships with many stakeholders and alignment on technology and funding.”

Deloitte explains that new regulations like GDPR and the California Consumer Privacy Act will force companies to meet more stringent identity requirements. Unfortunately, IT responsibilities are often spread across many different departments and are often not a priority for upper management. That can make it difficult to coordinate, budget, and deploy a comprehensive security solution for an entire organization.

Though many are hesitant to do so, Deloitte suggests that outsourcing identity responsibilities to a third-party Identity-as-a-Service company makes sense for organizations that do not have the expertise or the personnel to manage their own identity system. It advises other companies to adopt API technology that can be easily integrated with other apps and infrastructure, arguing that a good solution should be flexible, agile, scalable, frictionless, and open.

The solution should also respect people’s privacy, and be resilient and keep people safe from fraud and other cyber threats.

“Regardless of what business you are in, we all need to know that what we share is protected, what we access is secure, and who we allow into our systems are supposed to be there,” concluded Deloitte & Touche cyber identity solutions leader Mike Wyatt. “An integrated approach can help prevent a future digital identity crisis.”

(Originally posted on FindBiometrics)