Blog posts by Ivan Niccolai

What is a strong online identity? A strong online identity can be defined as a combination of identification, authentication technologies along with personal identity data store capabilities which enables a strong and resilient correlation of digital identities to a physical person, entity or organisation, thus enabling trusted interaction and communication between individuals and organisations. Strong online identities with full user identity sovereignty can be considered as providing a subset functionality that a fully-fledged Life Management Platform would provide. While this...

KuppingerCole has long noted the importance of blockchain technologies, whilst also noting that the key challenges to the adoption of blockchain technologies remained standardisation, privacy & security, as well as dilemmas regarding the types of blockchain technologies to adopt. In regards to these final two points, the main arguments have centred around the use of permissioned vs unpermissioned blockchains, as well as anonymous, pseudonymous or identified blockchains. Microsoft made some wise decisions in response to these challenges. Initially, by announcing Blockchain as a...

There is a lot of talk about the impact blockchains will have on the finance industry. The same holds true for FinTechs. However, what will be the real impact? Will we still have the same banking system in five or ten years from now? Or will some groups of banks (the small community banks such as Volksbanken, the large banks such as Deutsche Bank) disappear and becoming replaced by new players? Or will the banks absorb the FinTechs?   Before approaching this question, a brief overview of the fundamental characteristics of blockchains and key concepts is useful. A blockchain is a...

KuppingCole has written previously on the benefits of adaptive authentication and authorization, and the need for authentication challenges that go beyond the password . These benefits fall largely under the categories of an improved user experience, since the user only gets challenged for multiple authentication challenges based on risk and context, as well as improved security precisely due to the use of multi-factor, multi-channel authentication challenges. However, these multi-factor authentication challenges only offer additional security if the multiple challenges used for...

As more and more traditional services move online as part of the digital transformation trend, consumer-centric identity management is becoming increasingly vital business success factor. Customers aren’t just physical persons, they are also the devices used by customers, they are also intermediate organisations and systems which operate together to enable the provisioning of the service. While traditionally the identity and access management (IAM) discipline has focused on employee use cases, consumer-centric identity management is an approach to identification, authentication...