Have you ever logged into your cellphone, Wi-Fi and banking accounts all at once? If not, shouldn’t you be able to? A global trend toward digital consolidation is making merged digital experiences — wherein a user can access multiple unique services via one set of credentials — more and more common for the average consumer. If you are a diversified brand that offers multiple unique services, providing your consumers with single sign-on (SSO) is more than just a nice-to-have — it’s now a business imperative.

Access management, the process of granting authorized users the right to use a service, is at the heart of single sign-on (SSO). If you’re working in an industry that is experiencing lots of merger and acquisition activity, you must regularly recalibrate your technology and approach to keep pace with the size of your user community. Disparate services, accessed by a variety of different device types, must be connected and standardized via one platform, and that platform must be ready to scale and adapt as quickly as possible.

A Lesson From Luxembourg

IBM Security’s identity and access management (IAM) solutions support clients around the world with the strategies and technologies they need to remain secure while they undergo digital transformation. Our team of IAM experts works with companies large and small to help them maintain a high level of security even as their businesses grow.

One such example is POST Luxembourg, a key player in Luxembourg’s postal, telecommunications and finance sectors. Andre Leruitte, security architect at POST, recently visited our IAM marketing team to discuss how the company used IBM Security Access Manager (ISAM) to future-proof its access management program against business change. In the video, Leruitte explains how his team used ISAM to get ahead of the winds of business change, establish SSO across multiple services and accelerate application development processes with a centralized platform.

As a diversified, government-owned corporation, POST Luxembourg provides multiple disparate services to its users — everything from stamps to banking and cell service. As Leruitte explained, establishing a unified digital presence is paramount to remaining competitive. “Everything in the sectors we compete in is converging into one user account, one bill, but multiple services behind it.”

Still, federating identities across disparate systems to establish consistent SSO is often easier said than done. “It was really complex, with older systems where everything was separated, to be able to supply the customer with a unique user account where they could manage all their services,” Leruitte said.

A Future-Proof Approach to Access Management

Think about the state of your digital business today. What IAM solutions do you have in place and what channels do they support? If your business or agency absorbed another one, would your technology be ready to scale to provide the same level of service to your internal and external users?

When developing your access management strategy, work with the team in charge of your digital business to ensure that your platform can grow with your organization. POST Luxembourg is one of hundreds of clients successfully using IBM ISAM to provide access and authentication to their internal and external users. That’s part of why ISAM was recently named a leader in the “2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Access Management,” a holistic overview of the vendors competing in the market.