From e-government that provides access and delivery of government services to citizens, to e-commerce where businesses offer online trading experience, more and more the world is shifting towards digital transaction. Organisations are bound to build a digital identity system specifically to support this transformation in order to provide services to their employees, customers and constituents. Significantly, as the technology advances and attack pathways expands, organisations have to adopt Identity and Access Management (IAM) model that best support their digital identity system practice, hence the rising need for decentralised identity. Nevertheless, with a long list of advantages to be leveraged, adoption of decentralised identity come with challenges. What are the challenges in implementing decentralised identity?
The foundation of decentralised identity is to give back ownership to the identity owner. This concept not only advantageous to the consumers but to the service provider as well. How so? The answer is by putting the matter of trust at its right place. With decentralised identity giving the consumers complete control over their credentials, consumers have full visibility on how their data is handled. The end results, to consumers – better users experience, less identity fraud or data misuse, and to organisations – improve reputation and customer trust.
In technology, new adoption requires various changes to make the implementation work which include change of mindset and thorough execution planning (cost, time, innovation and more). The first stumbling blocks in the implementation of decentralised identity is compatibility. When digital transformation journey in every organisation happens at different speed and rate, it is challenging for organisations that pioneer decentralised identity. This is because as decentralised identity involves the utilisation cryptographic keys, the service is practicable only if the service providers are as well implementing the same IAM to provide access to consumers.
The next hurdle is acceptance. It has been known on how privacy and data breach negatively impacted the victims. Consumers are used to handling with simpler (easily understand) method of access authorisation. With decentralised identity being a blockchain-based application, certain consumers maybe reluctant to store their data in less understandable method even though it offers improved security. Enterprises, on the other hand, uses customers data for various purposes which include behavioural data analysis. The implementation of decentralised identity may hinder them from having access to these data, leading them to become reluctant in adopting this technology.
The implementation of decentralised identity is new and of course challenges are comprehensible. The need for transition towards the adoption, however, will become crucial when more organisations beginning to embark on and move forward in their digital identity journey.
E-SPIN being active in helping enterprise customers to implement enterprise digital transformation technology to achieve scale, scope and speed. E-SPIN since 2005, already in the business of supply, consultancy, integration, training and maintenance of various supplies for enterprise customers and government agencies. Feel free to contact E-SPIN for identity and access management infrastructure and application security, infrastructure availability and performance monitoring solution.
1. Identity Verification-What is Decentralized Identity?
2. From centralised identity to decentralised identity
