Your company’s success today is built on top of your existing user ID authentication systems — ensuring that users onboarded are trusted, genuine and legitimate. As your business readies itself for its next stage of growth, can your system keep up?
Onboarding journeys have gone through a myriad of transitions, starting from creating a simple username and password, to more complex security measures of multi-factor authentication (MFA), biometric authentication and more.
Nonetheless, these individual systems exist in silos, posing a challenge to developers to create an “easy-to-understand” system for its users to onboard. This is not scalable for any businesses looking to expand their borders, because it raises the risk of cybersecurity vulnerabilities, downtime concerns, higher maintenance costs and more.
As your business expands globally, your ID authentication system should function seamlessly on demand, from handling exponential growth in traffic to detection of fraudulent sign ups, in a swift and reliable manner.
To overcome these roadblocks, we need to look at challenges in digital scaling in the first place.
Access to the Right Resources
Here are some main concerns haunting business owners: How do you create a smooth and seamless IT-operational environment, together with a high integrity customer database that is both secure and easily accessible? Depending on the demands of your business, a scalable system needs the right resources to handle the rapid changes and spikes of information relating to data.
Similarly, an ID authentication system needs the right resources to decipher and isolate genuine and false data, manage, as well as store the data in rapid succession.
To achieve this, a few factors must be taken into consideration: such as software usage, hardware availability, architectural designs, etc. These upgrades do come with a hefty price, which includes additional maintenance cost and major bug fixes for an unknown period of downtime, causing cascading problems along the way.
Complex Security Setup And Features 
With the rise of user traffic for digital businesses, businesses have radically upscaled their data requirements, leading to a more complex security design and flow. A plethora of security measures have been implemented to protect these important databases, without considering that these measures might not be interoperable with each other.
The advantages of these wide range of security measures may cancel each other out when improperly implemented — resulting in higher risks of data leaks, and lower cost optimisation. Human resources are also negatively impacted as well, causing them to experience “alert fatigue”, reducing department productivity and increasing turnover rates for a business.
A survey done by International Data Corporation (IDC) in 2021 reports that companies experiencing alert fatigue ignore 27% of all alerts, resulting in a productivity loss whilst increasing cybersecurity risks towards the organisation.
A scalable ID authentication system should be well-integrated, generating a secured database whilst preserving a pleasant customer onboarding experience.
“Designs that are created without a basis in a comprehensive security policy will leave vulnerabilities in the protection of the organisation and its assets. These are vulnerability holes in the security program that are created by the system designer’s lack of awareness of some critical asset needing protection, some unanalysed threat, or some vulnerability that is unknown without a comprehensive security risk assessment, security master plan, and security policies and procedures.”
– Thomas Norman, Integrated Security Systems Design (Second Edition), 2014.
Lack Of Automation Within The System
Cybercriminals are leveraging automation in their attacks (take ransomwares for example), while many organizations still rely on manual efforts in implementing cybersecurity techniques. The lack of automation within ID security systems results in process setbacks and the inability to identify new threats.
Furthermore the lack of automation is unsustainable in many major industries that are rapidly expanding. For example, the booming healthcare industry is overwhelmed with the initial processes such as ID verification and customer due diligence assessments. This can be solved within minutes through the help of an automation system.
Security without automation is like bringing a knife to a gunfight. Without the help of automation, the process of identifying new threats takes longer due to factors such as segregating false alarms and lack of monitoring. This creates an opportunity for hackers to infiltrate through a backdoor access, unnoticed, or noticing only after it is too late.
Identity Access Management (IAM)
Cybersecurity is a top priority when it comes to data-driven companies, and IAM solves the issue concerning the access from internal (i.e. executive level employees) or external parties (i.e. hackers) trying to pry on the sensitive information that forms the success of your business, no matter how small or large.
As opposed to the traditional username and security password, IAM specifies the right people with the appropriate level of authorization within your organization to access certain tools and data through Single Sign On (SSO) integration.
However, in a survey done by Fortra in 2020, 75% of organizations have at least a few users with more access privileges than required, which is a 5% increase from the previous year. If IAM is a step higher than the traditional security measure, why does this happen?
Just like a clock, IAM has many repetitive moving parts that are manually configured, leading to errors in access restriction, resulting in substantial losses not only in time, but in money and security at the same time.
A non-automated IAM system delays the productivity of its users as it takes longer for a user of a lower access level to gain access to important business information. On the other hand, failure to revoke access for certain employees as quickly as possible provides a gap of security as well. In closing this gap, the IT team would need to through each user’s account to understand their level of access and manually revoke it. This method of manual provisioning and deprovisioning is labour intensive and is prone to major human errors.
Taking into account as well the ever-changing growth of technology, policies or other elements in businesses, large-scale IAM comes with many requirements to meet scalability demands, which is not efficient or sustainable in the long run, especially for large organizations.
Why Do Businesses Today Need A Scalable Security System
Innov8tif has always been a key player in the ASEAN market to create a secure authentication system for organizations that struggle with scalability or looking for a one-stop solution for their digital security needs.
By leveraging the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and low-code process, Innov8tif promotes EMAS CIDA, a living framework which provides different types of ID authentication solutions to help implement a comprehensive ID assurance process for users as well as help identifying and mitigating online identity fraud.
Created to cater for different business needs, EMAS CIDA is a highly customisable, one-stop centre to all your digital security needs, offering multi-layered authentication tools such as ID verification, biometric authentication, document authentication and more.
With our constant development and 24/7 support, organizations can solely focus on the growth of their businesses and scale our system based on their growing business needs, while keeping your data safe and secure.
Learn more about EMAS CIDA by reading our beginner’s guide to EMAS CIDA, or get in touch with our team at [email protected].
