Every enterprise that interacts with customers’ needs a system to authenticate and authorize them to protect their confidential data from unauthorized access. An identity Management system helps enterprises to manage individual identity, their authentication, authorization, roles & privileges that are specific to the enterprise requirements. Identity Management system ensures that only authorized individuals access the enterprise systems according to given permissions and restrict any unauthorized access to enterprise confidential data. There are multiple Identity Management products available in the market, few of them are listed below for reference:
Each identity management system comes with its own benefits & limitations. Enterprises choose the right identity management system based on their requirements and policies. This document doesn’t cover the difference between identity management systems available in the market. The context of this document is to cover the transformation of the existing identity management system.
Though existing identity management systems are secure and successfully managing individual identity but there are still few below-listed gaps in the existing identity management systems. Enterprises spend
Enterprises spend a huge amount to maintain and secure customer identity. Customers are providing their financial details, personal details which might be shared with external parties without customer consent & control. These points trigger a need for the change in the existing identity management system towards more secure & controlled systems, which would help enterprises to save cost & provide their customers controlling powers to manage their personal and financial details.
Blockchain is expected to surge in the coming years due to its value-add for businesses. A Gartner forecast posits that the value of Blockchain for businesses will exceed $3.1 trillion by 2030.
Businesses are responding to this potential value in kind by investing in new solutions. The graph below depicts the global spending on Blockchain solutions in recent years and projected through 2022.
What is Blockchain?
Blockchain is distributed & decentralized ledger technology which helps to securely store & distribute the data among all the network participants without any central control. Blockchain consensus protocol / algorithm replaces the central authority to validate the transaction authenticity. Blockchain builds the chain of blocks in the ledger where each block is linked to its previous block.
How Blockchain Works?
Blockchain is designed to bring all the ecosystem participants on the common agreement before adding any new transaction on the Blockchain ledger. Whenever any party initiates a transaction, Blockchain uses a consensus protocol to circulate the same transaction across all the participants to get their consent on the transaction before persisting that in the Blockchain ledger. Once all the participants agree on the transaction then Blockchain replicates the same transaction to all the participants’ ledgers to build trust and transparency in the network. Having the same replica of transaction ledger for all the ecosystem participants helps to avoid Data reconciliation problem for smooth settlement among all the participants.
How Blockchain can manage identity?
Blockchain platform helps to bring multiple parties including identity provider, customer & identity verifier on the same platform. The idea behind bringing all the parties on the same platform is to reduce the verification time, effort & financial burden of the enterprises which helps them to bring customers on board quickly.
Most of the enterprises while doing customer onboarding request for their identity before granting them access to use their resources. Upon receiving customer identity, enterprises depend on the external vendor for Identity verification which is itself a time consuming and costly process. Enterprises are spending huge amounts of money on this identity verification process.
Blockchain-based identity management process helps to save time, effort & cost for enterprises and help them to seamlessly onboard customer without involving the external vendor. Blockchain-based identity management system aims to bring enterprise and customer on the Blockchain platform so that external vendors which are an additional burden on the enterprises can be removed from the process.
Given below is the high-level process to manage and validate identity on the Blockchain platform.
To understand the transformation between legacy identity management process with Blockchain based identity management process, let’s take a use case for Customer Onboarding.
The customer Onboarding process involves following parties, where each party is playing a different role to successfully bring onboard customers into an enterprise system.
Following is the legacy process to on-board customer in the enterprise
Following is the Blockchain based customer on-boarding process for the enterprise
The following are the key features that would help the organization to decide for transforming an existing identity based system to Blockchain-based identity management system. Key Features are: -
Blockchain-based identity management systems help organizations and customers from various perspectives. Following are the few benefits which Blockchain will provide to associated organizations and users:
For every enterprise maintaining privacy & security for their customer identity and their personal data is very crucial. Enterprises are spending lots of money to keep them secure & confidential. There are multiple platforms available in the market which could help to manage Customer’s identity confidential and secure.
Hyperledger Indy Hyperledger Indy provides tool, libraries and components to manage user’s identities over the Blockchain. This platform targets to bring different administrative domains, departments, sectors, identity providers on the common platform to manage and secure user’s identities. This platform key features are:
Microsoft Digital Identity Management Microsoft is planning to release Digital identity management system that will provide control to users to manage and secure their personal and confidential data. Microsoft is actively collaborating with members of the Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF), the W3C Credentials Community Group, and the wider identity community. They are working with these groups to identify and develop critical standards. They are developing an open source DID implementation that runs atop existing public chains as a public Layer.
IBM Verify Credentials IBM Verify Credentials, Decentralized identity is how individuals control when, where and with whom they share their credentials. In the physical world, we take this sharing of credentials for granted – yet a secure, smart way to do this has been long missing in the digital world.
That’s about to change. IBM Verify Credentials creating a decentralized approach to identity management – enabled by Blockchain – building on top of open standards in combination with Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF), World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and other standards groups.
For the successful implementation of Blockchain based Identity Management solution, it is crucial to understand the right approach to implement Blockchain based solution. Based on Coforge’s deep expertise in design, development & implementation for Blockchain based identity Management solutions, Coforge help their clients to determine the right approach & Blockchain platform among various available options. Coforge’s follows below mentioned approach to conclude.
Engage: In this stage we
Differentiate: In this stage we
Deliver: In this stage we
Leverage: In this stage we
Blockchain based Digital Identity management systems helps enterprises and customers in following perspectives