Introduction:

Per Forrester report, APAC security decision-makers responsible for IAM at their organization cited multiple factors as driving IAM adoption, including: improving customer experiences, supporting cloud migration and complying with complex regulatory requirements. The report also reveals that 83% of APAC technology decision-makers who work in information/IT security anticipate that their budget for customer identity and access management (CIAM) will increase in the next 12 months, signaling unprecedented demand for solutions that can systematically address these challenges.

This trend aligns perfectly with the core value proposition of Alibaba Cloud IDaaS. One enterprise, facing the complexity of managing a multi-channel, large-scale user base, successfully built a unified digital identity platform by deploying Alibaba Cloud IDaaS. This integrated the identity systems across its diverse touchpoints, including websites, apps, and mini-programs, and yielded quantifiable business returns:

◉ Increased Business Agility: The deployment time for identity systems on new business channels was reduced by 60%, enabling faster business innovation in response to market changes.

◉ A Win-Win for Customer Experience and Conversion: A consistent Single Sign-On (SSO) experience was provided to over 16 million users, effectively resolving the pain point of switching between multiple platforms and ultimately boosting the customer conversion rate by 18%.

This successful implementation fully demonstrates the core value of a modern IDaaS platform as a growth accelerator. As Alibaba Cloud's native, enterprise-grade identity management service, IDaaS is designed to build the solid identity infrastructure that drives business growth.

1. A Cornerstone for Empowering Superior Customer Experience (CX)

The Forrester report emphasizes that a superior digital experience is key to competitive advantage. Alibaba Cloud IDaaS provides a solid foundation for this:

Unified Identity and Seamless Login: By integrating with various identity sources like DingTalk, WeChat, and AD/LDAP, and offering a rich array of authentication methods—including SSO, social login, and even passwordless authentication—IDaaS delivers a consistent access experience across all user touchpoints.

Frictionless, Secure Access with Adaptive Authentication: Powered by an AI-based behavioral analytics and risk engine, the system intelligently assesses login risks based on user behavior, device, and network context. This enables passwordless login in trusted scenarios while requiring multi-factor authentication (MFA) only when anomalies are detected. It not only eliminates the friction of repeated registrations and forgotten passwords but also elevates the user experience to be exceptionally seamless while guaranteeing security.

Comprehensive Identity Security: The solution also integrates with bastion hosts, SASE, Privileged Access Management (PAM), and Alibaba Cloud RAM to provide clients with a unified framework for identity security and privileged access.

Managing Non-Human Identities: For non-human entities like applications and microservices, it provides unified identity registration and credential management, supporting secure integration via standard protocols like OAuth 2.0 and OIDC.

Rapid Application Integration: With pre-integrations for hundreds of popular SaaS applications and support for standard protocols like SAML and OIDC, enterprises can rapidly onboard new applications into the unified identity system—in as little as 5 minutes—ensuring the integrity and continuity of the user experience.

2. An Engine to Accelerate Cloud Migration and Ensure Compliance

Cloud migration and compliance are major drivers for IAM adoption. As a cloud-native SaaS, Alibaba Cloud IDaaS offers inherent advantages:

Agile Deployment and Elastic Scalability: It requires no on-premises deployment, enabling rapid go-live and elastic scaling to match the dynamic needs of enterprises during cloud migration.

Granular Access Control and Compliance Support: IDaaS provides fine-grained access policies based on multiple dimensions such as user, device, and network. It supports localized data storage in multiple regions within China and abroad, helping enterprises easily meet diverse compliance requirements and safeguarding their global business expansion.

3. Addressing Emerging Risks with Comprehensive Identity Management

As cloud-native and AI technologies proliferate, the boundaries of identity security are expanding. The Forrester report highlights the urgency of managing machine identities.

Comprehensive Identity Coverage: Alibaba Cloud IDaaS covers not only EIAM (Employee IAM) and CIAM (Customer IAM) but also non-human identities. It enables unified credential management and secure authentication for "machine identities" such as applications, APIs, microservices, and automated processes. This is particularly critical in the era of large AI models. Whether for AI training tasks, model inference services, or RPA flows, a trusted machine identity is essential to secure data access and API calls. Alibaba Cloud IDaaS provides lifecycle management and dynamic credentials for these AI workloads, securing automated processes and service-to-service calls and effectively mitigating the growing risks of supply chain and API attacks.

Leveraging its comprehensive capabilities, Alibaba Cloud IDaaS has successfully served leading enterprises across various industries, including government, manufacturing, retail, finance, tourism, education, gaming, and AI. Its clientele spans high-growth organizations, Fortune 500 companies, and key state-owned enterprises.

In an era where identity is the new perimeter of the digital world, choosing a mature, reliable, and market-proven IDaaS platform is a critical step for enterprises to build resilience and win in the future.

Source: Forrester, The State Of Identity And Access Management In Asia Pacific