Expert Chat: Interview with Ian Lowe

Yeah, great. We have to hurry a bit, but that does not mean that we cannot dig a bit deeper.

I, what I really loved about your presentation is that you replaced the term remote working, which I hate because it's does not make any sense anymore to me with trust at work. So really putting also the trust in the center of this concept as we are not only working from home, but actually working from anywhere. Can you bit elaborate more on this concept of trust at work, how that plays out for the organization, for the employer, but also for the employed people and maybe also for other types of workers like, like freelance or external staff.

Yeah, no, it's a great question. So thanks. Thanks for asking that. And when I talk about trust at work, it, it really has, I think an impact here in terms of how we should be thinking about security and establishing that zero trust model. And the reason we're moving away from remote work is remote work was really a knee-jerk reaction to, you know, the, the first part of the pandemic we had to establish security.

So our, our employees could work from home, but as we've move, as we move outta the pandemic and we move into a, a new era of work, it's gotta be more dynamic because it's not just about remote work at, at home anymore, where we will know the IP, we will have fairly high confidence of say the IP address that our employees are logging in from cuz they're logging in from the same network fairly regularly, or we know the devices that they're using instead, we're gonna be seeing a lot more flexibility in where we're working from. So we could be in a coffee shop.

It could be in the B on the beach, for example. And so there's lots of fluctuation in these locations.

So, you know, it's about establishing trust and establishing trust could be layer layering on and taking a more proactive approach to authentication and authenticating someone's identity. So if you don't know that they're logging in from a known location, maybe we need to step that up.

So having that continuous assessment of where they're coming from and trust is not only about the employee accessing the applications that they need to do their best work on, but also from a business perspective, enabling trust or, or building confidence that they can trust their employees to do the work that they need to do wherever they might be. So that's why, that's why I wanna move away from this like pointed view of remote work that it's all about trust at the end of the day and enabling trust at work. Right. Great. Thank you.

And of course I liked the, the, the OUS ludicrous speed slide. And, but, but when you talk about this acceleration of delivery of services for the, for the customers and what has actually changed in the delivery, how was that possible that this increase in speed is, is possible? And how does identity come into play here?

Is, is this the accelerator? Yeah.

Well, I think it's partially the accelerator. I think there's lots of things that have come in, right? So if you think about, I can give you an example of one UK retailer who had a, actually a really bad experience during the pandemic and is actually no longer with us. Unfortunately they on, on black Friday, which is their biggest retail day, right? They have a, an online, they had an online presence, unfortunately, that online presence went down. So there was a reliability issue there.

So customers couldn't get in and they lost a lot of customers and ended up putting that, you know, that, that fault, that problem around reliability cost them their business at the end of the day. So establishing reliability is one part of establishing trust, being consistent there identity is another part. And when we talk about identity it's consistency in terms of the experience that they have with your application or with your website.

And what we've seen is a real focus, a real like narrow focus on that experience, cuz that's at the end of the day, how customers differentiate themselves from each other is the type of experience. And again, another great example of a customer that delivered a great experience by focusing on identity as the Royal Belgium football association, where they had six different applications. So one for players, one for referees and one for like customers that wanted to buy memorabilia from, from Royal Belgium football on like the red devils or whatever it might be.

And each of those websites had their own data stores for identity and their own login experiences. And they were getting lots of turnover and attrition cuz people couldn't log in. And every time they went from one site to the next, it was different, so caused confusion. So they ended up unifying that all under one unified view of identity and put a consistent experience in with single sign on to all of those sites. So if you were a referee, you could log into your referee site, but then use your same identity to log into the store to buy something.

Cuz you're not just a referee, you're also a customer. Yeah. Great. I think that is an important aspect and it really comes close to what I actually wanted to ask, ask as the next, next question, because I've talked about integration and, and, and interoperability and you, you talked about integration. I interoperability, sorry for that.

So the, the missing element in between the glue, our APIs and the APIs two third parties, and I think identity is an important part here as well. So what are relevant aspects for creating this identity ecosystem, this infrastructure and using identities in that context, from your experience? What are the relevant aspects here? Yeah.

Well, that's a great example around B like a B2B use case where you've got potential partners coming into maybe your own business to update, you know, pricing data or whatever it might be. And I, I have an example of a CSO that I was talking to where they actually had a breach and it was down to a third party integration into their backend services using APIs. And this third party was a supplier. They had just standard username and password login apply to the integration that they had with the backend services. And a hacker was able to, to break that relatively simply.

And they, they were able to get in using a weak, you know, configuration of that API and do some damage in that customer's environment. So API security and standardization is really important, but API security plays is, is a really big part of your unified approach to identity cuz identity. Isn't just about the I identity attributes, but it's all the ecosystems that support it around that to deliver a great experience at the end of the day, that that experience covers your workforce, your customers and your partners that are, that are accessing your services and applications. Great. Okay.

And maybe another aspect to look at, and as we all use this term trust more or less without explaining what is meant by it and what are the, the, the definitions and the dimensions of trust from your experience. And you've also had the word trust in the, in the, in the, in the headline of your, of your talk, what are the key aspects from your experience?

What, what is trust, what are you looking at when it comes to defining trust and why is it so important? Yeah. Trust is important for many reasons. Trust is important from an experience perspective.

Like I, I think I've, I mentioned a few times already. I'm really keen on that. So when you establish trust, you establish a great experience and you don't wanna lose that experience is a differentiator, but you have reliability. So getting the things that you, you know, that were supposed to be delivered to you, you know, you trust that those are gonna come when you order them, or you can trust that you can access the applications.

So reliability is a key component of trust and then adaptability, the ability to, you know, move and, and adapt and scale with your customer base as it grows or as it shrinks, depending on, you know, what part of your, you know, what part of your growth scale you're in is really key and then resilience always being up and ready and available other, just some of the key aspects, Right?

And maybe one other other aspect that I really liked is, and what I really think of, we, we, as, as employees have been spoiled by these, these events that we had in the last year, because we could work in a way that we were not used to. And the customers, as you said, this quick delivery of, of more services, quicker services to the, to the customers, how are they reacting to that? Have we spoiled them?

Are they, are they now used to getting quicker, better, faster services? And do they expect that to, to increase, to accelerate, to be better even in the future? Is this something that you see in the re reaction from the customers towards the providers of services?

Yeah, that's I think what I refer to as the consumerization of experiences, that's the Amazon effect where yeah, we can go online order something. I mean, in the us, you can order something and you can have it delivered with an hour here in the UK. It's next day delivery on pretty much anything I want. Right. I think that has driven that consumer experience is driven all of our expectations. We expect our any, any, any business that we're dealing with to be able to deliver in the same timeframe.

So yeah, absolutely. It's driving a big change.

Okay, great. We have one minute left.

So when, if you could do some recommendation to our audience to say where, where to start moving towards trust, what would be your first aspect to look at, to say, okay, when you want, want to improve something, do it here. Yeah.

Well, I think it's taking a step back and I, I think the Royal Belgium football association is a great example. They, when they were looking to renew their approach to their digital experiences online, they took a big step back and they looked at all of the personas that they were dealing with and how they wanted to interact with those personas.

And at the end of the day, what was a consistent experience, they could deliver that cuz then that filtered down to how they handled identity, the view of identity that they wanted, how they can build the experiences and the ecosystem and interoperability that they had to apply. Great. Thank you very much. And then I think that is great idea, really, to step, take that step back, see the bigger picture, see overlaps, see missing elements and just make sure that the picture is complete, but as reduced as possible. Thank you very much Ian time flies when you're having fun. Wonderful.

Thank you, Matthias. Thank you for the, for your feedback and for the interview. Looking forward to talking to you soon. Okay. Bye. Now.