How to Extend Identity Security to Your APIs

From Ping Identity

Protecting your customers’ credentials and data is critical if you want to keep them as customers. As high-profile data breaches make the news, consumers are becoming increasingly aware of potential security threats. Concerned about protecting their identities, they’re also paying more attention to how organizations secure their data.

Some attack vectors, like attempting to steal customer credentials through brute force attacks, can be proactively mitigated by security measures implemented within your organization. But others, like phishing scams or shared credentials that are compromised at other organizations, are more difficult to preempt. In either case, should you become the unfortunate target of attack, your company and brand reputation are at risk.

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) provides a layer of protection to your enterprise and your customers. No longer just for employee use cases, MFA can be successfully leveraged to secure your customers’ interactions with your digital properties and mitigate the ripple effect of compromised credentials.

But unlike your employees, your customers have a choice about working with you. To make MFA work for customers, you have to strike a delicate balance between security and convenience. To get customer MFA right, you need to make implementation choices that ensure both customer experience and security are optimized for various use cases. You also need to determine the best way to introduce MFA to your customer base and decide if that means requiring it or making it optional.

Implementing multi-factor authentication for customer use does require careful planning. But when done correctly, it can give your customers the additional security they need without sacrificing the seamless experience they expect.