BY CAREY O’CONNOR KOLAJA
The future of each of our identities—the ownership, utilization, protection, humanization of them—is what we think about every day at AU10TIX. Why? Because our identities are the modern-day key ring, unlocking access to the digital experiences, assets and information we need to participate in everyday life. It’s not an option to not share personal information online; solving for how to do that safely and seamlessly is a societal imperative. And we’re thrilled to join technology trailblazer Microsoft on its quest to build a more trustworthy identity ecosystem.
Announced today at Microsoft Ignite, Microsoft is launching a verifiable credentials capability in Azure Active Directory. As described in a blog by Joy Chik, Corporate Vice President, Identity Division at Microsoft, the new capability enables organizations to issue digital claims about identity attributes based on open standards. Individuals can manage credentials in the Microsoft Authenticator app, and developers will be able to request and verify credentials via an application SDK. The goal is to improve verifiability while protecting privacy for businesses, employees, contractors, vendors, and customers.
AU10TIX is one of a few select leaders in identity verification coming to the table to work on this initiative, that is striking a critical milestone for our industry, one in which we are choosing to collaborate in order to compete (a notion I recently wrote about in SC Media).
Collaboration around the topic of identity management is so important today for two main reasons:
First, the exceptional rise in synthetic fraud and the sophisticated techniques being employed by cybercriminals demand an intelligent, coordinated defense. Fighting fraud is no longer a siloed task for risk and compliance departments in highly regulated industries; rather, it’s a multichannel, age and industry agnostic threat. During the pandemic, we’ve seen children emerge as one of the biggest identity theft targets and survey results that suggest Americans are more afraid of cyberattacks than terrorist attacks.
Second, the arrival of our truly physical-digital existence requires businesses to strike a fine balance of fluidity and security. We all want instant, friction-free access to work, money, content—but not at the cost of having our identities or information compromised. Last week, I spoke to Karen Webster at PYMNTS about exactly this—the idea of useful friction to help protect the “digital dust” we generate each time we go online.
Microsoft is realizing its dream of decentralized ID starting now, and I am excited for AU10TIX to be a participant in this journey—one of a variety of initiatives we are exploring to collectively reimagine the future of identity management.
Read more about this groundbreaking initiative in WIRED.