Page 28 - FCW, May/June 2020

Digital Experience
How context
enriches CX
Deeper insights into customers and employees contribute to robust, frictionless authentication
Habib Hourani
Solutions Engineer, Okta
how and what they allow access to. That approach also enables agencies to automate the process of onboarding new users and deprovisioning accounts
when employees leave the agency. It offers an additional layer of security that’s not apparent to the end user but is incredibly important for the organization.
Improving access to services
Agencies fundamentally use the same set of tools to authenticate employees that they use to authenticate citizens, but they implement those tools in very different ways.
A citizen who needs to sign into the
DURING THE CORONAVIRUS pandemic, the traditional boundaries for
security have been dissolved. When government employees could not go into their offices, they needed to be able to
do their jobs remotely. But an employee signing in from an iPad at home must
be treated differently from the same user signing in on an office computer. That meant agencies had to move security from the boundary of the network to the identity of each individual.
Fortunately, advances in authentication are giving us a deeper understanding of the context around employees’ activities, which makes the process more secure without hindering the end user’s productivity. In other words, agencies can achieve a higher level of assurance about each individual user’s risk.
For instance, we can do risk scoring for users and tap larger datasets to identify known bad IP addresses. By looking at a user’s geolocation, we can flag a sign-in attempt coming from, say, Nigeria or North Korea for a government employee who is clearly not in either location. As a result, agencies can start to be more deliberate and prescriptive about how they handle authentications and can enhance their ability to deny suspicious logins.
A best-in-breed approach
Enabling employees to be productive and customer focused is a two-step process. First, the government is increasingly taking a best-in-breed approach to tools. For instance, Okta is laser focused
on multifactor authentication and
authorization. So rather than agencies trying to build that capability, they can use Okta’s solution and always be up-to-date on that aspect of security. We are also seeing agencies move toward adaptive tools that offer additional insight into users’ activity and adopting standards that enable interoperability among those best-in-breed tools.
Second, agencies need to build an environment in which those tools can thrive. That’s where solutions like Okta’s Advanced Server Access come into play. By relying on the OAuth 2.0 framework and zero trust identity and access management, it allows agencies to be more granular about
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