BYOID: the new acronym you need to know

New research shows that both the lines of business and IT departments see value in “Bring Your Own Identity” (BYOID) initiatives, where social networking or digital IDs are used for application logins. The groups also agree that more security is needed to increase BYOID adoption. 

The report, “The Identity Imperative for the Open Enterprise 2014,” conducted by the Ponemon Institute and CA Technologies, examines business user and IT department attitudes toward BYOID.

“In today’s application-driven economy, access to applications has to be simple and secure. BYOID is an increasingly popular option for simplifying access. It can reduce the need to create new accounts for every site, which leads to registration fatigue and abandoned shopping carts,” said Vic Mankotia, VP, solution strategy, Asia Pacific & Japan (APJ), CA Technologies. “We are working to make sure we enhance BYOID security without adding friction or complexity.”

The report, which included responses from India and Australia, provided several key insights into BYOID, including the current state of adoption, its perceived value, views toward the identity providers and how BYOID could be enhanced.

According to the report, BYOID deployment using social IDs is still in its infancy, but interest is high, especially for mobile and web customer populations. There is a high level of interest in BYOID and using social identities such as Facebook, LinkedIn or Yahoo, with 50% of IT and 63% of business users globally expressing interest. 

Interest is even higher amongst APJ business users, at 67%. Customers engaging with the business via the Web and mobile device were highest rated for targeted digital identity engagement, eclipsing other populations such as job recruits, employees, contractors and retirees.

Perceived Value

Identity is now viewed as a contributing growth asset as well as a security component. Both IT and business users agreed that an important reason for BYOID adoption in their organisation was to achieve a stronger identity credential and get a higher level of confidence that a user is who he says he is (69% and 65% respectively) especially in APJ, where 79% of business users feel this way. But business users globally cited capturing attributes about users as the biggest benefit (89%). This indicates an evolving view of identity. No longer viewed as simply a component for protecting data, identity is now seen as a value asset that can provide data which could drive incremental revenue and help maintain customers.

Additional security developments could drive increased BYOID adoption. The majority of IT and business users said “identity validation processes” would help increase BYOID adoption (72% and 70% respectively). Implementing fraud risk engines also rated among the top three priorities across both groups. 

In APJ, business users feel that simplified user registration would help the most (80%). Interestingly only 27% of business respondents globally believed formal accreditation of the identity provider was very important / essential, while 59% of IT users believe formal accreditation is very important / essential.

Respondents’ preferred identity provider varied based on the situation and region. When asked what social ID was of most interest to their organisation, IT users ranked PayPal as the preferred identity provider across all regions. Business user responses varied with Amazon edging out PayPal and Microsoft. When asked what social ID respondents preferred as a consumer, Google was highest ranked among both IT users and business users globally but Facebook was the provider of choice for business users in APJ.

“A holistic examination of the attitudes uncovered in the research show two clear views of identity,” said Dr. Larry Ponemon, Chairman and Founder, Ponemon Institute. “IT continues to take a traditional risk-based, security view of dealing with identities, while the business side takes a more value-based, customer-centric view of identity. In order to gain the most value from any BYOID initiative, these two groups must collaborate and become allies for secure business growth.”

*Images from an associated infographic from CA Technologies. View the full infographic here.

*The study was commissioned by CA Technologies and conducted by the Ponemon Institute, an independent research firm specialising in privacy, data protection and information security policy. It surveyed 3,115 IT and business professionals located in the North America, Brazil, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, India and Australia. All of the respondents were from organisations with more than 1,000 people; 75% were from organisations with US$500 million or more in annual revenue. The study was completed at the end of June 2014.