Should you build or buy a Customer IAM solution?

The most important assets of any company are customer identification and personal data. In most situations, businesses come across two simple options when designing a platform that collects, handles, and uses consumer data: to create or to purchase.

If you’re reading this blog, you probably already know how important a Customer IAM solution is to your business. We hear about a major data breach exposing customer identity credentials every week, so whether your company is B2B or B2C, clearly Customer IAM matters more than ever for security and privacy compliance. But Customer IAM is also a crucial tool to gain and keep your customers’ trust and provide a positive user experience with your online services. So one important question remains: should you build or buy a Customer IAM solution?

When deciding between building and buying an access management solution, the first step is to assess the company’s cybersecurity needs and potential risks. 

Once you’ve assessed the company’s risk, consider whether your development team could build in the security safeguards needed to manage those risks. If you have especially complex or demanding security needs, building the necessary protections into your existing system will be more difficult.

If your in-house engineering team does not have security experience, consider partnering with third parties for security testing, audits, and other services. Having a trusted third party look at your system can help ensure your security measures are sufficient.

Another factor to consider is whether you partner with any other third parties, such as software-as-a-service providers, that enable features within your system. If so, you’ll need to assess the security aspects of these third parties as well and whether they could better integrate with a homemade or other third-party solution.

Key reasons to consider outsourcing:

It’s complicated, and the problem has already been solved: Designing, implementing and securing an IAM can be a handful to say the least and, in most cases, IAM is not a core competency of your business. You already have enough unique and pressing problems to solve, do you really want to allocate resources away from your core business challenges to tackle IAM service?

Knowledge and expertise: It takes a considerable amount of knowledge to build and secure an IAM. In some cases companies may find that they simply don’t have the internal expertise required.

Extensibility: Many 3rd party IAM providers offer a suite of services and features towards Identity Management that could open up many opportunities for your business. Not only do they provide basic functionality for managing and protecting customer identities, but they also offer ways to reduce friction on sign-up, login, or purchases. They also provide critical analytics to allow executives to plan and/or make critical decisions.

Key reasons to keep it in house:

 Budget: Sometimes, you just can’t afford a 3rd party system…. and you have internal developers who are competent enough to get the job done.

Conclusion: 

Of course, the final answer (as always) is that it depends. It depends on the level of in-house security expertise, budget, time, number of users, future plans, etc.

With that being said, organizations should almost always default to ‘proudly built elsewhere’.

Take advantage of the tech that has already been developed, tested, and maintained by skilled 3rd party providers dedicated to the task. This is particularly true for an area like security and access, where the potential risk of getting it wrong is an enormous liability. 

Ask yourself, is it really worth diverting internal resources to recreate the wheel? Wouldn’t you rather have them doing work that will improve your core business instead?

Also consider the fact that, by the time you launch your own solution recreating the features that already exist in the leading IAM products, they will already be several steps ahead with new technologies and you’ll still be lagging.

Hopefully, this initial level setting will help in making a more informed decision. It certainly helped us at Phase2 to make a recommendation that we felt 100% confident in.