Customer Identity Management Best Practises!

We live in an era of technology where the data can determine the direction of your business or your startup who wants to dig deep into customer behavior insights. Many big cloud based identity management solutions have already been established in order to better analyze and measure the behavior patterns, interests and any kind of domestic information about the customers that they might have shared previously. All this information then builds up the data blocks that contribute highly in the success of your business.

Customer data management shortly known as CDM plays a crucial role here. The main motto of CDM is to solve customer’s problems and provide solution to their requirements. Hence the proper take care of the entire CDM is essential since if a business wants to attract or retrain its customers, a clear understanding of customer demands is the most needed thing in order to provide high quality experience to your audience.

Let’s see what are those best practices that make the customer data management more efficient and successful.

Employ constant Data Monitoring:

Customer data is constantly in variation, which is of course the main reason to employ data monitoring principles. For strong data monitoring purposes you may need specific notification techniques to maintain overall data quality and some established security policies to keep data organized and on the point. For an efficient data monitoring purpose there should be a provision of a bi-weekly scan of all the incomplete records to ensure that the entire database is optimized and updated. Moreover this bi-weekly scan is also good to erase some not so long useful data records.

Establish restricted access to customer views:

There should be some obligation on the access rights of individual users. For example for a salesperson is only liable to read only the financial data about a customer where as someone from finance department can have the administrative access to customer credit information. Limiting the access rights subsequently increases the security standards and it also creates a comfort level for customers to reveal their critical information with the organization.

Create a single custom view:

Creation of a single custom view is one of the best practices that offers you a greater control on customer data. In present times everyday there are numbers of acquisitions owned by different different companies so when it is the time of data merging, duplicacy is most welcomed. This duplicacy can be avoided by investing in single customer master. And to ensure business consistency and operational efficiency, the master customer records must be integrated into a central database which is further controlled by a single administrative application

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Is BYOI the new authentication norm?

You must have heard about the concept of BYOD (Bring your own identity), an idea of getting your own stuff works properly in some dedicated situations. And now comes the next iteration of this movement that is Bring your Own Identity (BYOI).

The phenomenal concept of BYOI is already bigger than any concept because it simply combines almost everyone who goes online. The dominant nature of modern business-customer relationship forces people to use digital identities and business to use an eminent identity management systems for external users. However, it’s the liability of organization to simplify the relationship with end user.  

The concept of BYOI is a way of digital authentication in which end user’s usernames and passwords are managed by a third party vendor. It’s a growing concept in identity and access management.

The concept behind Bring your own identity!

The theory of Bring Your Own Identity contributes more than just an identity to an organization. It addresses the reality that users are increasingly using personal mobile devices in the workplace. Similarly, it also solves the problem faced by security providers of losing users in the absence of a transparent and secure identity and access management process.

The concept of BYOI was basically a result of a chain of events occurred in many commercial workplaces worldwide. Day by day organizations were getting increasingly populated with uncommercial, employe-owned devices and on the other hand users didn’t want to memorize different access credentials to submit to excessive inconvenient authentic measures. Precisely, users want to minimize the redundancy when it comes to identification and authentication and companies also are eager to do so. This is where BYOI comes in.  

Bring-your-own-identity: An identity external to your systems!

BYOI makes use of an extrinsic identity source for identification instead of creating a unique identity specific to a particular subject system. For example, today most of the people are habitual to use their Facebook and Twitter identities to access other services like newspapers, magazines and other sources. The omnipresent “SIgn Up using Facebook” option is an example of BYOI.

External identifiers like biometric scanners such as fingerprint scanners and retina scans.These are also again the information that authorizes identity and access externally in this BYOI method.

Risks associated with BYOI!

On the other side, BYOI may increase the risks of data breaches and losses it’s robustness as compared to other methods. For example, is a third party identifier like Facebook and Twitter which is used for BYOI experiences a breach this might reflect an increased risk in your system as well.

Well this is all for now in the chapter of BYOI. we’ll be updating this for enhanced knowledge soon.

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What's the real essence behind Multi Factor Authentication?

Time has no limits. It continues to evolve and so as our technical world. With time, men has invented a number of methods for authentication such as documents, seals, tokens, secret questions and many others. Some of these practices still have some existence but they are not that significant when it comes to digital world i.e. internet.

Let’s talk about the basics here. The terms identification and authentication may be used interchangeably but in the core they are totally different. Identification is to claim the identity of a person or a thing and authentication is the act of confirming that identity. Let’s understand this concept with an example.

At the time of creation an online account, you provide your name, dob, email id etc. claiming to be yours. This is a part of identification process. Now when you log into this account you authenticate yourself with this identity.

Now let’s see what are the factors of authentication!

Factors of authentication refers to the variety of ways that can be used for authentication and when it comes to means of authentication there are mainly four categories. Here they are:

Knowledge Factor:  This is based on something that you know like a PIN number, passwords, security questions etc.

Ownership factor: Under this method of authentication, people authenticate themselves with something they posses like ID cards, key, tokens or identity cards etc.

Inherence factor : These authentication factors are based on someone’s inherence characteristics for example fingerprints, retinal patterns, signature, DNA patterns etc.

Usage of these Authentication factors !

Based upon the following authentication factors, authentication can be of following two types:

Single factor authentication:  when a single form of any authentication element is used to confirm a user identity is then known as single factor authentication such as a password to confirm the user identity. This is no doubt the weakest level of authentication. People share their password with one another which gives unauthorized users an access to your account.

Multi factor authentication: When two or more factors are used for the authentication purpose, it is multi factor authentication then. Multi factor authentication is undeniably an escalated level of security in which user has to present evidence for his or her identity. It is implemented when there are higher need of security. ATM card is a good example of multi factor authentication. Users first need to present something that he has i.e. ATM card and then something he knows(second factor) i.e a PIN number.

Some common examples of authentication that we come across so often :

• Showcasing a photo Id to confirm your identity
• Logging into your social accounts or email.
• Unlocking phones with PIns and passwords.
• Money withdrawal from ATM.

So this is all about authentication. I hope this pretty much cleared your perspectives about it. Share your suggestions in the comments below.

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What is UI testing and Why it is important?

User interface (UI) testing is to ensure a positive user experience from an application which means testing your software application to see how it is interacting with users. As a conclusion of UI testing we get valid responses for the following:

• Usability
• Consistency
• Accessibility
• Compatibility

In laymen terms, UI testing is carried out to see how a system handles mouse and keyboard inputs along with the verifying whether it displays text, images, icons, menus in place or not. Ui testing is basically for two purpose: usability and errors. Post completion of this testing, one will be able to answer following questions:

• Are all the functions of your software and application working properly and are they easy to use?
• Is it easy to navigate through your application without encountering any bug and error?

Many methods are already evolved to perform UI testing like human or manual testing and automation testing. While Automation testing is easy to do, manual testing is time consuming and requires more efforts. Well, which is better over another is not the matter of discussion now, here we will see why this UI testing so important and what are the benefits of it. So let’s start with the benefits!

The biggest benefits I’ve found after GUI testing are:

• It let’s human GUI testers to do their job that normally robots are doing these days.
• It provides some regression errors.
• GUI Testing covers those parts of application also that are left behind in unit application testing.
• It tells you the difference in behavior between multiple platforms i.e. Windows/Mac/Java versions and various other operating systems.
• It allows you to pounding over the system again and again to find any memory or resource leak.

Personally, I don’t recommend automated GUI testing for every single application, I mean when you are hiring people for software testing then Why utilizing these paid tools for every single task. So if you find this post convincing enough, do let me know in the comments below.

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How to promote your blog like a Professional blogger

Promotion is one of the key to become successful in any field. Every blogger wants to become successful and has its name in top influencers in it niche. For that they make efforts in their content, make it attractive and readable so that visitors can appreciate.

Along with great blogging efforts, there  should be right promotion of blog, content and the blogger.

Below are some such tips which can help a blogger to do promotions.

Guest Blogging: Guest blogging is posting your unique content on other blogs to promote your blog and attract traffic from that blog. It is a method by several bloggers to promote new bloggers, get fresh content on their blog and promote via guest blogger’s promotion channel.

As an ethical practice, most of the bloggers do cross guest blogging, to promote and get promoted mutually.

Ever blog has its own audience and traffic. To get noticed by that audience, blogger can ask for posting its content on that blog under guest posting rules.

Social Sharing: Social sharing is very much crucial for a website. It helps content to reach new/existing social media audience. As soon as a content reach among social media users, they can interact with it and again re-share it. Re-sharing  cause increase in visibility and promotion.

Social sharing can be initiated by using social share buttons on the blog.

Create a content strategy:  Before deciding what to write and starting to write, take some time to create a content strategy, that’s what professional bloggers do.

Creating content strategy will help you stay focused on your goals and content, which indirectly helps you connect with your blog visitors.

Some of the visitors may even suggest you content which they want post on.

This way you can initiate an interaction with your followers and attract new followers.

These are some ways you can promote your blog the way professional bloggers do.

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3 Clever Examples of best sign up forms!

Your website is the first place that establishes the first interaction between your business and your web visitors. Hence it becomes innately essential to ensure ample of opportunities to ask for their information at the first place for future means of communication. Sign up forms can be a really good medium to attain some basic information like their name and email addresses of these visitors. But if these forms are not straightforward and unclear to people, they can be a big reason of a potential loss for a business.

Here are some more points that clarify why these sign up forms are important (especially for bloggers).

For a Blogger the first and the foremost thing is his big list of email subscribers. Since it is the subscribers only who give your blog a long life and keep it Google-protected that make money for years to come. And signup forms are the obvious solution for bloggers to ask for their visitor’s email address. So just get these forms right and get all the traffic in the world by converting those random visitors into your long time subscribers.

For inspiration, take a look at the 5 most engaging signup forms of big brands:

Quicksprout !

Neil Patel, founder of conversion based companies like KISSmetrics and CrazyEgg is for sure a person to keep an eye on for some really cool stuff. Neil’s homepage is in fact not a signup form, instead it asks visitor to enter their website’s URL. And it has been found that many people loved this and provided their URLs which can be as beneficial as their email addresses.

Attractive points of this kind of form!

• It opens up with a universal need and question!
• Minimalistic design approach and very less distractions!
• Valuable free giveaway.

Matador Network !

It’s a travelish kind of website with a lots of inspiring content. I don’t know how many of you love popups but the popup presented by this website is really amazing. It is a mixture of photography, inspiration and simplicity which makes really hard not to enter an email address.

Lessons from his signup form:

• Authority quote to create trust.
• Photographs that install excitement in your brand.
• A pop up lightbox, that fades out regular content.

Digital Photography School !

This website uses a successful sign up form but I really want to mention the homepage signup form which is beautifully integrated with the featured content at your homepage. I found this a really interesting approach as your visitors will automatically drawn to the featured content, no matter how many times they have already seen it.

Points to consider:

• Signup forms is presented at the top of the most eye catching content of website.
• Directly in line of sight of your readers.
• It seems that you need to enter your email address to read the content.

So these are some of the signup form examples that I found really interesting. Give them a look and share your opinions with me via the comments below.

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Five Types of Multi-factor Authentication Solutions you would like to use

2016 witnessed huge data breach incidents that caused leakage of over 2.2 billion records. Here using a password-based authentication along with a good hashing algorithm used to ensure security but can you guarantee that your users are not using easy-to-guess passwords? Well, the statistics imply something else. This gave a whole many reasons for businesses all over the globe to introduce multi-factor authentication. The article here will highlight five most common types of multi-factor authentication solution that you would like to use this year.

1. HOTP/OTP based MFA:

After SMS based, this one is another most common type of multi-factor authentication These one-time password techniques generate a secret code for the user that he needs to enter in order to get access. This secret code comes with an expiry duration. This code is generated by an authenticator app the user needs to install on its mobile device. One such authenticator app is Google Authenticator.

2. Magic Link Authentication:

In this authentication process, the user needs to provide his/her email id instead of submitting password. When the user provides email id, a direct login link also known as magic link, is sent to the provided email id. To gain access, the user needs to sign in to its email id and click on the received magic link.

3. Yubikey:

Specially helpful in downgrading and Man In The Middle Attack, Yubikey is a small devices that is enabled with a small USB and NFC. This device supports multiple login and cryptography protocols. To opt this strategy, any user can program it on their own while enterprises can also do it in bulk for its employees The technology can be easily used with internet services, password managers, etc.

4. Access Tokens:

Another efficient way of using multi-factor authentication is by using access tokens. The process holds special importance in restricting access to critical data in case of high-security risk environments. The process provides access only when the environment is casual. In this approach the user needs to request access to any resource from a control center and this request can either come on physical level or via a web portal. If the request comes from known environment, access token is provided using which user can get in.

5. Biometric authentication:

The concept of biometric authentication is here since a long time. But now, the concept has reached to masses as consumers are using devices that are equipped with retina sensors, fingerprint sensors, etc. While Windows 10 comes with Windows Hello (Face recognition feature), Apple comes with fingerprint authentication feature in the form of TouchID.

Well, multi-factor authentication is not an optional line of defense. Today, if you want to stay away from coming into headline for wrong reasons, you have to keep your employees and end-users safe.

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