Digital transformation – the impact on the market
The implication of digital transformation on identity impacted both the enterprise and the consumer market.
But let’s take a step back and start with an overview of the two markets, how they differ, and their relationships with digital identities.
On one hand, we have the consumer market. The term consumer market, in this context, refers to the market that targets internet users. In other words, every time we consume a cloud service from a PC or a mobile (for example, Microsoft OneDrive or Google Drive) or we hit a website, we are in the consumer market. The consumer market includes social networks (for example, Facebook), search engines (for example, Google or Bing), e-commerce web applications (for example, Amazon, Zalando, or eBay), and, in general, everything consumable by a general internet user. In the consumer market, the service targets us, we represent the final user, and, most importantly, we represent the source of revenue. This revenue may come from our money, our data, (which can include both personal information and/or tracking and collecting our behavior on the web), or anything else that can be profitable.
From a very high-level standpoint, the typical objectives that service has on the consumer market are as follows:
- Increase traffic
- Encourage the users to access the service as much as possible
- Get money:
- From advertising, if the business model of the application is ad-based
- Increase the transformation rate in e-commerce applications
- Any other profitable revenue that comes from the product service model
On the other hand, we have the enterprise market, a market where, historically, giants such as Microsoft, VMware, HP, Cisco, Oracle, and IBM competed to sell products to install and consume on top of servers in the customer’s data center. These tech giants targeted the enterprise market by offering products to the IT department of a company. The IT department of an enterprise company, in turn, needed to create services on top of these products to be consumed by the end business. The result is that these tech giants have always been far from the end business; they have always been focused on boosting the internal IT departments of enterprises. This was the enterprise market that we knew until a few years ago.
The advent of the cloud in enterprises took this paradigm a step further. Today, some of these tech giants, such as Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM, have become enterprise cloud providers. They sell Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) cloud services to serve their enterprise customers that don’t need a private data center anymore. Enterprise customers take advantage of cloud services by fueling external business and at the same time boosting internal employees’ productivity. This has an important implication: offloading the IT complexity and data center management outside the enterprise by delegating it to the cloud providers and letting themselves focus more on their core business rather than on IT tasks and data center management.
Thanks to the enterprise cloud, which provides the capabilities of the past with less complexity and, most importantly, the new capabilities of the next generation, the next wave of the enterprise market is being created. Companies are constantly looking for new ways to improve their business with technology. The cloud market is young, and the efforts by the IT giants to onboard new customers (enterprises) at this stage to guarantee long-term revenue in the upcoming years are a top priority for them.
The portfolio of services that cloud providers provide to enterprises is huge. As anticipated, services span from simple servers (virtual machines) to web servers, to container hosting, storage, backup as a service, and much more. Identity providers are another important service offered to enterprises, and this is the core topic of this book.
In the context of digital identities, if we try to compare the consumer market with the enterprise, we will notice something. In the enterprise market, unlike the consumer market, there is a high level of complexity. The reason for that is that companies are supposed to manage their identity services for their employee. Identity, on the other hand, is consumed in the consumer market and managed by identity providers, such as Facebook or Google, just to provide two examples.
This concept has several implications. To properly use identity services, we need an enterprise-grade identity strategy that can simplify the complexity of this wide and critical topic.