Authentication is crucial to ensuring the inner workings of today’s digital world keep moving seamlessly.
That’s because authentication hiccups can hamstring an organization, resulting in lost sales and costly customer churn.
A core component of both cybersecurity and organically scalable software access, frictionless identity and access management processes are foundational to keeping sensitive data safe and secure while ensuring business scalability.
But while using certified identity data for digital authentication is complex enough for B2C engagements, the difficulty and sophistication of ensuring effective and easy authentication processes ratchets up to the Nth degree for B2B engagements — where the end user is an enterprise organization or business, not a single individual.
“A lot of B2B authentication flows are so much further in the past than today’s consumer authentication, because they involve more legacy technologies and legacy SaaS (software-as-a-service),” Stytch Co-founder and CEO Reed McGinley-Stempel told PYMNTS.
McGinley-Stempel explained that for businesses, B2B authentication is actually a security and IT admin question of wanting to control which users have which privileges to log in using a preferred identity provider, including making sure that when somebody leaves a company, they don’t have access to internal applications anymore.
“Building authentication for B2B applications is often complex and requires a lot of resources and back-end development,” he said.
Enterprises face unique challenges when it comes to authentication and authorization. With different requirements and enforcement frameworks, it can be difficult to find a one-size-fits-all solution.
While authentication itself may be transitory, building an authentication provider for B2B requires a longer timeframe and more engineering time.
The reason behind this, according to McGinley-Stempel, is that “each enterprise is quite idiosyncratic in what they actually want,” which makes it necessary to build a data model that empowers organizations to allow for all of their individually preferred settings to be configured by the admin and by others on their behalf.
This means the model of enforcement for authentication and authorization is very different from enterprise to enterprise because it is all predicated on these settings by the organization.
“And so you end up effectively with this data model where each organization in your data table has drastically different settings for how they want to authenticate into your application,” McGinley-Stempel said.
“After you sign your first few enterprise customers, you often get even more bespoke items like a homegrown identity provider system from Amazon, or one chief information security officer who only wants sessions to last 15 minutes versus 24 … but are firms actually going to go change everything in their system just for this one customer? From a B2B standpoint, sometimes you will because that’s six or seven figures, but you typically don’t want to give up an entire quarter of the roadmap for your engineering team to do so,” he said.
SSO (single sign-on) is a non-negotiable requirement for enterprise deals, and without it, businesses simply cannot compete.
That’s why it’s important to start with organizations themselves as the “presumptive foundational layer” from both a scalability and a programmability perspective.
As generative artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly commercialized, more businesses are looking to integrate its future-fit capabilities into their own workflows.
It is also increasing the sophistication of bad actors and their fraud tactics.
“The only truly phishing-resistant authentication method out there today is Touch ID and Face ID on your applications, because there’s no way for somebody to transfer the session state to that other application,” McGinley-Stempel said.
He explained that “a lot of B2B customers in a more secure space will opt for [device fingerprinting] so that they know when somebody’s accessing from a new device they’ve never had before.”
With the right approach, B2B authentication and authorization can be streamlined and simplified, letting businesses can handle bespoke items and ensure that their transactions are secure and reliable while making it easier for enterprises to focus on what matters most.
Stytch’s own newly expanded B2B authentication platform also offers tools to help companies decide programmatically whether to allow access, reduce access, block access or challenge access with a call or captcha.
Looking forward, “one of the things people in the identity space are most excited about is this concept called passkeys that is a new way to do cross-device biometrics, and it pretty much moves us away from the password-laden world into a much more seamless UX,” McGinley-Stempel said. “I think we’re at the precipice of where that starts to take off in adoption.”
He added that one exciting, future-fit benefit of passkeys is hedging for “whatever future risk quantum computing might introduce” because the authentication solution solves a lot of the most easily crackable quantum attack routes, including passwords, password guesses, brute force attacks, and more.
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