When it comes to business, digital identity management primarily means how a customer’s information is collected, processed, stored, and accessed. Of course, all these steps have to be done safely and securely.
However, it’s not always as straightforward as it looks. Many businesses are exposed to the wrong methods of managing customers’ digital identities, which can lead to a failure to build much-needed trust.
This article provides four ways to help you avoid a crisis: managing your customer’s data and building a trustworthy relationship.
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Collect & Use Only What’s Needed
As easy as this sounds, many businesses are eager to collect customer data for the sake of it. They let customers go through a registration process capturing many essential details. This haste and method can put you at odds with the people you’re trying to serve, mainly when you apply the data without careful consideration.
Collecting unnecessary data leads to problems, including waste of resources, increased threats, and the risk of identity theft. Further, gathering too much data also causes customers to abandon registration due to the time-consuming and intrusive nature of the demands of some registrations.
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Limit Access to Data
Collecting data is one thing, and using it continuously is another. For this reason, sensitive customer data should not be accessible to everyone at all times.
You can deal with this using field-level encryption to set up access based on an individual’s role. This refers to the ability to encrypt data within specific data fields, making the received and processed data unreadable to anyone who lacks access or the keys to decrypt it.
When you limit access to data, you’re blocking unauthorized access to protected information, saving your customers the stress of threats and branches.
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Optimize Security With Data Encryption & Hashing
Data isn’t a stagnant concept, so when it is in transit from one server to another, it’s at its most vulnerable. For this reason, encryption in transit is crucial to data protection. Still, encryption at rest is necessary for all data compliance efforts.
Hackers and malicious individuals will stop at nothing to decode coded information. With this development, it’s best to utilize one-way hashing for safeguarding sensitive data like passwords, which is a must-do.
Whatever the case, encryption will ensure your platform is safe for your team and customers.
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Apply Secure Authentication
Authentication is a vital component built into systems to verify a user’s identity. While some users are capable of looking after their information, they may be unaware of the impacts of digital identity verification and the security it entails.
However, companies must reduce risks, which means investing in safer authentication systems and applying them across all levels. That includes high levels of multi-factor authentication (MFA), SMS or a call-in code, and/or an email link, and risk-based authentication (RBA), which recognizes user patterns and alerts the system if this pattern suddenly changes.
The bottom line is having a solid system of validation.
Conclusion
To earn your customer’s trust, you must respect them. While digital identity management practices did not always respect customer privacy, modern times dictate modern choices.
These tips will help you strengthen your brand reputation and build customer trust. Always use only the data you need, optimize security, and do everything possible to secure your customer’s data.
