Ian Lowe: Trust Arrives on Foot But Leaves in a Ferrari

Well, welcome to this. Yeah. Talk on trust, arrives on foot, but ultimately it leaves quickly leaves in a Ferrari. So my name is Ian Lowe and I lead our solutions marketing team as part of the part product marketing group here at Okta for Europe. And for those of you that don't know at Okta, you know, at Okta, our mission and our vision is to really accelerate a world where everyone can safely use any technology. What that means at its highest level is Okta enables simple and secure access to any application for people and organizations everywhere.

We make it really easy for you to manage identity so you can establish trust. And we really are that, that ID. So last year with the, you know, with the pandemic, it really accelerated it in digital transformation, whether we were ready or not, this is both an exciting and a challenging time for us. And for all of all of us as it leaders exciting because it confirms how critical identity is and how critical establishing trust is for all of us, for any organization. And really what's interesting is, you know, the CIO is becoming so, so important that, you know, they really are.

The CEO of the future. Trust is not only about the business. It's also about customers. It's about citizens, it's about the workforce, and it's also about their experiences with you as, as a business, but also about their experiences with the workplace and your services and your apps to find out how the pandemic affected trust.

At Okta, we commissioned a survey and it covered more than 13,000 office workers and executives and customers around the world. And we were looking to answer a few questions. Some of those questions included how much of our trust is built, maintained, and broken in the digital world today. And how much do we trust when we only engage through our screens? Like we are here today, how do you know I am Ian Lowe, 39% of the respondent said reliability service reliability was one of the key criteria that was most likely to make them trust a digital brand.

This included things like ensuring items arrived on time and were in good condition when they ordered them from a, from a, a re a retail website or that they could log in and access the applications they needed to, to do their work. And over half of the respondents said they always or will often be working from home. And they demand more flexibility, especially from, from a, you know, from a future of work perspective.

They, they are looking for a more dynamic work environment. And over half of them, 64% said they would show a real reluctance to engage with an, a really unknown or unheard of brand. So it really highlights the importance of trust. And one of the things we realized while we were conducting or building our report is that digital transformation was moving at a, at a new speed. We were already, you know, in an area that is really exciting from an it perspective. And it was a really fast paced area for most organizations.

And we were probably already at light speed with all the projects that we have on the go, but with COVID and, and the pandemic, the speed of light just wasn't fast enough. And so most organizations, their projects went beyond their expectations and they moved at ludicrous speed. So if you've ever watched space balls, or if you've seen the movie, you know exactly what I'm talking about and what I mean by Ludi ludicrous speed is this most projects taken during the pandemic were delivered way faster than anyone could have expected projects like enabling remote work.

And collaboration went from an expected 450 days to implement before the pandemic to just 10 and a half days. So from almost a year and a half to 10 and a half days, I mean, that's a significant acceleration and delivering new online experiences and new digital services went from almost two years to just one month, but we know acceleration doesn't come from free for free to deliver at this pace. We most likely look took additional risks, these risks that we would never have taken in normal situations.

And when you see these numbers and the challenges, we get two things, really one, we might be a little bit scared because there's so much to take care of at such an increased pace, but number two, this is really a macro change and it's happening to everyone in every organization. And we as great leaders treat these macro changes as unique opportunities for differentiating our company and for differentiate, differentiating ourselves within our organization. So like Winston Churchill said never waste a good crisis. So let's go and talk about how we can take advantage of this opportunity.

So I wanna talk through three broad opportunities across trusted work customer-centric digital experiences and how identity is central to establishing trust in our digital lives. And in each opportunity, we'll walk through how you can think about the immediate and the long-term strategies for, for them, and then illustrate a customer I'll, I'll try and illustrate and a customer in its journey for each of them.

My goal here is not to give an exhaustive list list of the things you should be doing, but offer just some prescriptive guidance on how to connect these trends and really how to, you know, unify identity and establish trust. Trust. If there's one thing I want you to take away from this section is the power of identity in shaping your organization's strategic goals. So the first opportunity area is trust at work. And during the pandemic, there were a lot of technology purchases made to solve temporary needs like, oh no, we're all working from home.

How do I make sure that my employees can securely access the applications they need? And everyone was just figuring out how to keep the lights on. Much of the spend went into enabling and connecting end users. And now many organizations are sitting down to look at and reevaluate if the models that they implemented last year and now are going to stay for the long haul. And many of our customers are saying, well, how do I go back? And I secure everything that I've just implemented. A lot of the projects I've just done are very much, you know, point projects.

They were a quick reaction to, to the pandemic and dynamic work is not just about re remote work. It's not just about enabling remote work. It's all about preparing for the future of work. It's about enabling trust at work and whether that's remote or whether that, whether you're in the office or wherever you want from any device with the trust on both sides, from both the employee perspective and the business's perspective. So in the short term, it's about continuing to think about how you enhance employee productivity.

Did we just turn on remote work or do we have a full remote work strategy? It means optimizing self-service tools like PLA passwords, password reset, sorry. So they're not eating away from it organizations all the time that they take and, and in doing that, and it means to be really people focused and meet the needs of the end users to understand how they're using the technologies that you're enabling them with, and that they're using them to collaborate in the way that you want them to optimize remote enablement, putting digital support structures in place.

Now more than ever, organizations need to build flexibility, but also empathy into these structures to enable trust at work. For example, as HR, reimagines hiring from all over the globe or all over the country that they're in, instead of concentrating on just a single city, how are you gonna support that global goal of enabling anybody to work from anywhere? And how do you onboard those remote remote candidates quickly streamlining life cycle management employees will join.

They move, they leave the organization. So how do you keep tabs on that in an efficient way? Some quick wins include automating, onboarding and off onboarding and automating your identity processes. So if we look at the, the longer term strategy as a CISO, one of our, one of our customers CISO said identity management when done right, is not an service like granting access or service desk requests or resetting passwords, but rather identity management is a control.

Like, how do I know it's you? Why do you need access right now? And why do you need it independently from provisioning and all of this kind of questioning. If you're running identity management as an it service, you're not running it optimally. And this is, this is the exact words from our, one of our CISO customers. So second is about zero trust. The corporate security perimeter no longer exists in this remote world of this world of work from, from wherever you are, whenever you are zero trust is about delivering productivity and security with the least friction possible.

So that means that the right people have the right level of access to the right resources in the right context. And that it's assessed continuously. If you're not thinking about security controls rooted in identity, you should. And I'll share one of our customers examples now with you, who, who has really benefited from this?

Oops, I think I just skipped on there. So thanit district council is a council here in the UK, and they provide continuous support to citizens. Every wa every, even while working from home, they used technology to continue providing these services to every citizen remotely. And when the pandemic hit, they were faced with a number of challenges. So one of them was enabling a workforce of 400 strong to remotely access applications in the mixed of all the confusion of the pandemic caused.

They needed to simply manage user identities much more efficiently with, without relying on manual processes. There's nobody in the office to do that management. And they needed to enforce security with, with, you know, strong identity and access management, best practices to prevent any risks around cyber attacks. And they wanted to manage access rights remotely and more swiftly when employees were changing departments who were leaving.

So their solution was to adopt, to, to adopt Okta single signon and multifactor authentication to really strengthen their security and why they, they, they adopted that solution in our solutions to really quickly integrate with their existing applications. So today Okta supports over 7,000 integrations with most major cloud applications and on-premise applications. They were a big Google workplace, Google suite, G suite user. So they wanted to enable that multifactor and single sign on to all of those applications. They needed to automate HR tasks.

So they used Okta lifecycle management identity, lifecycle management, to further boost, agility and security by keeping access rights update at all times. And with Okta, they were enabling employees to keep using the same work tools that they were used to. They didn't have to change any of the ways that they were working. So the way that they were accessing the HR system, that they, the way that they were accessing their master directories didn't change. And there was no further training needed for them to get up and running. And yet they could implement all of this extra security quickly.

So opportunity number two is all about customer centric, digital experiences. So this opportunity is transformed by a few factors market trends accelerated by the consumer consumerization of digital experiences. This is how consumers are expecting, you know, their retail experiences to have a very similar quality to user experiences they would use in their personal lives.

So this means like the Amazon experience and for it organizations, if you are just focusing on protecting your employees, you're missing out on a much bigger portion of it, potential it organizations are really shifting from a how you can do that to empowering everybody in the business and their peers and their business groups to accelerate innovation, which could be a great career opportunity for both it professionals, because good, it works both inside the organization and outside. So in the short term, apply learnings from workforce identity projects to your customer identity projects.

A lot of this thinking is about securing your customer experience without compromising it enabling a really seamless experience is, is critical. So we see many organizations start their identity journey for employees, and then take those learnings and eventually scale them to customers. I talked a little bit about zero trust earlier as a strategy to solve for changing security landscape. The challenge for customer identity is that those controls were never there.

So zero trust doesn't really apply, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't think about it because really that experience, the customer experience is driven by identity. So you, so you should be thinking about identity driven security, and we can still apply many of the same principles from zero trust, but we just have to use maybe some different risk signals. What you need is a way to manage risks for both your customers and yourself. So you can't ever control your customer's network access. I dare you to try, but fraud is a huge problem. So how do you prevent that?

You can build great experiences through experimentation. So if you don't know what the customer wants, start by collecting some data and connect customer data with other applications so that you can improve your customer retention, personalization of customer experiences. It can boost total sales.

And this is experience from our existing customers by between 15 and 20% and having a single view of the customer by integrating identity with other applications like your marketing systems or your customer re customer resource management systems and your content management systems can be a real, real differentiator ly. And then one of the KPIs you should be looking at is data cleanliness, as you are integrating data views, ensure that data is a good data. And the view is standardized and set standard procedures. I hear from most of the successful customers that I talk to.

It's all about aligning as an organization on a standard taxonomy around identity protectively, bringing in legal or sorry, proactively bringing in legal compliance security teams early on in the journey to collaborate. So in the long term, and I think I might just be behind myself here. Just one slide, sorry. So in the long term, the strategy should be establishing trust as a different, as a differentiator. Trust is a crucial driver of modern day customer expectations for all digital experiences.

In fact, Forbes found that 17% of customers abandoned transactions due to concerns about security and 80% say they stopped engaging with a company altogether. If the company experienced a breach, we talked earlier at the beginning, how trust arrives on foot? So establishing trucks trust takes a long time, but as soon as you something happens like a breach, that trust is lost instantly. It leaves in a Ferrari. So in highly regulated industries like healthcare and financial services and government agencies, trust is even more paramount when interacting with customers.

So deliver one custom experience and consistent experience across all of your customer-facing applications, services, or websites. We saw this from one of our customer examples that providing one cus consistent experience, enabled the organization to build out and roll out one new experiences more quickly, but also to gain ROI because they didn't have to create new, new operations, new workflows each time it was all consistent and standardized. And I'll talk to one other customer of ours in a second, and how they did that.

And then look at how you can really monetize identity identity is complex, and it's often equated with cost reduction or it efficiency, but the companies who truly utilize identity as a foundation for establishing their organization goals, they actually see that as a big differentiator and a revenue generator. So now I'm gonna look at one customer of ours. Vectors vector serves as a national information center. They help insurers providers and the public understand the costs and realities of healthcare in the Netherlands.

Whenever a Dutch citizen submit some medical declaration to a health insurer, that information goes into the vector database. And before Okta, each of the company's applications had its own identity store with some internal applications using active directory and others using something else. And as they grew the work of managing all of these applications and the identities in these separate databases was becoming complex and, and over overly burdensome burdensome.

So some of the challenges that they faced were they had over 4,600 customers and millions of citizens that needed access to validate health data securely. They wanted to unify their user identities across eight separate applications and enforce strong security policies across the login experience. And ultimately simply managed access rights, more swiftly across all of those applications. So they engaged Okta to help them connect the companies, proprietary apps. And they used one of our applications within the Okta identity cloud, which is called Okta universal directory.

It sits on top of all of your other directories, like active directory and other, other data source. And it provides you a unified view of all of those identities. And then they used our Okta API to connect using open standards, such as SAML and open ID connect to integrate with those applications that they had running. And at the end of the day, Okta enables vectors to add new applications and services and experiences extremely quickly with little to no change.

And they never have to bother people anymore saying you have to log in like this username and password, let's say for application a, but for application B, you have to log in with your username and password and this special code that I'm sending to your phone, they can standardize the, the login experience across all of their applications, and they don't have to develop it each time. So for most organizations, the world is hybrid. And what we mean by that, there's a real mix of on-premise applications and services and ecosystem components.

And there's a large number, a growing large number of cloud applications. And at the center of that is really identity. And it's really critical to this, to your approach. And interoperability is key. So interoperability across your it personnel and the solutions, and they should be working with and integrate with whatever application you have, regardless of hosting model OnPrem multi-cloud or cloud native. So the third opportunity area is unified taking a unified approach to identity. This is gonna be a very important word in 2021.

Lots of customers made purchasing decisions for transformation at work for, you know, trust at work or for delivering great new customer experiences based on short term needs and assumptions about how 2020 would progress. And the pandemic also defied all of our it leader expectations in terms of implementation timelines. So now is the time to think deeply about what's going to ha have, you know, what's going to move the dial.

And much of that is in the cloud and, and is, is actually the, the relationship between your, your cloud applications that you're looking to adopt and your on-premise applications. So in the short term, you know, look at enabling, look at enable and secure what will stay. These are the things like your on-prem enterprise report, you know, resource planning tools, your human resources systems and the middleware that will stay as they are second retire. What's lost value, perhaps ADFS isn't working anymore. It's not able to scale it.

Doesn't support your cloud apps, maybe your old LDAP based directory isn't working. So on the other side of this thinking are the systems they are right for, that are right for retirement. So let's put a plan in place to get these off our plates, rethink what is holding you back SharePoint, active directory, multiple disparate, unconnected, disconnected identity databases with the pandemic, forcing many of us to reevaluate what is truly business critical. It becomes more important than ever to think from the lens of planning for future growth.

And that starts with identity and hit taking an identity centric view of everything. So a longer term strategy is all about that identity view, consolidating and unifying identity across cloud, across on-prem and across, across your hybrid environment at Okta, we are known for being that vendor to help you secure and manage your cloud applications and delivering a lot of business value through authentication, single sign on. And it's easy to do this for cloud apps because they support a lot of open standards and SSO is pretty easy to deliver, but really for unifying everything across cloud.

And on-prem, it's gotta be simple and you have to be able to make it work without changing the on-premise applications themselves. Unifying doesn't mean everything rolling up to the cloud. It just means having a single view of your data so that you can choose where to best execute it, whether it's in the cloud, where you can take advantage of machine learning and compute scale, or at the edge where you do have some challenges around latency or bandwidth issues.

So with that, I wanted to, you know, just close off with the fact that identity is central to everything and identity matters for everyone and everything. And there's four pillars to identity. There's our citizen identity. The one that we use every day to travel when we're allowed, of course, or to, you know, help us establish new identities at government services. So that includes our passports and our driving licenses. Then there's our customer identity.

The one that we need to, the one that we need to use to access and authenticate the websites that we're looking to buy something from, or to do a transaction on like a banking website, then there's our worker identity. The one that we use to authenticate to our workplace applications and the building itself so that we can do our best work. And then there's a fourth pillar to identity, which is IOT. So these are all the devices that are coming online like cars or your fridge, or your D doorbell or your cameras.

And at the end of the day, identity is central to making our digital lives as seamless and simple as possible. And each pillar is unique in its scaling and deployment challenges, but are there, there are common horizontal threads and who, and what matters in order to establish trust trust. And when we aren't able to establish that trust, or when we do establish that trust, we, we it's, we lose it. We there's opportunities to lose it quite quickly.

So further to that digital trust index that I talked about earlier, that, that, that report, that survey that we did over half of, you know, our respondents said that when trust is broken, it's really difficult or impossible to reestablish. And we're seeing this through and through. And so some of the stats here are showing that when, when they're not, when, when organizations lose trust either through a breach of data or through mishandling of our user data, we're unlikely to do business with that company again.

And when we don't know a company it's really hard for us to do business with that unknown brand. And that's why it's really important that when we establish trust, we keep that trust. We protect our applications.

We, we protect our websites, we protect our, our business. COVID accelerated it and digital transformation for everyone. So there's just a few, few takeaways that I wanted to close off with here and finish off the presentation. So delivering great online experiences is a complex, and that is consistent across both our workplace experiences and our customer experiences. So start with identity it's central to establishing trust and delivering those great experiences.

So with, with that, I'd like to thank everyone for taking the time to listen. And I hope this was a, a good conversation. And with that, I'd like to open to any questions.