As organisations extend their technology to partners to realise business benefit the importance of security cannot be overlooked. With much of the focus and energy flowing towards business requirements the issue of security and providing access are often overlooked until the later stages of the project. This can cause problems, not only in terms of the ability to realise the business benefit but also wreaking havoc with budgets and timescales.
Here are our top 5 tips to be aware of at the start of your B2B initiative:
1. Security and access starts with Identity Management
In order to provide timely access, you need a method to efficiently capture someone’s identity, their entitlement, gain approval and configure the access required. Without an efficient way of achieving this your partner portal will suffer entitlement creep or low adoption due to lack of access.
2. Not all partners are the same
In today’s B2B environments organisations work with everyone from large corporations through to small niche players. What are the different types of businesses in your B2B ecosystem and what access does each require? Do you anticipate this to be a requirement for your B2B initiative and if so how are you going to manage that at scale?
3. Focussing on providing access not removing it
As we liven up new platforms the goal is to provide access and drive adoption. However, what about the removal of access. It is much harder to determine whether an individual from a partner organisation still works for that company, have they left? have they joined a competitor? Introducing recertification processes to validate the entitlement to access is essential.
4. Underestimating the administrative overhead
The administrative overhead for a B2B platform is significant. Not only is the partner ecosystem typically much larger than that of your own organisation, but your service desk also lacks the business context of why a company, individual or group requires access. Securely devolving administration out into the business and even the partner organisation, streamlines this process and improves accuracy of access.
5. Not all identity and access management platforms can do this well
Many identity and access management platforms are designed with the workforce in mind. In addition, design decisions for these platform mean that more sophisticated requirements that are common place in a B2B settings are dependent on consulting and customisation. All vendors will likely be able to achieve your requirement, however at what cost and in what timeframe?
At ProofID, we provide a selection of fully managed identity management solutions for a wide range of different industries and sectors. By identifying next generation technologies, we can provide bespoke fully managed identity management solutions which perfectly complement your online services.
For a full range of our products visit our homepage, here. Alternatively, talk to one of our dedicated team members by calling us today on 0161 906 1002.
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