TECHNOLOGY

Customizing User Journeys with CIAM

Published

9 months ago

September 25, 2023

User engagement is a critical component of the modern digital business landscape.

If you fail to engage your customers with seamless user experiences, you’ll lag behind your competitors.

But when we talk about engagement, one crucial aspect is often overlooked-personalization. Personalization is undoubtedly the key to your business success since customers always expect tailored experiences throughout their journey.

However, delivering personalized consumer experiences requires businesses to jump on the digital transformation bandwagon by adopting a reliable customer identity and access management (CIAM) solution.

Undeniably, a CIAM clutches the potential to offer customized experiences, including personalized greetings, product suggestions, relevant services based on previous purchases, etc. And most renowned businesses are already leveraging the same for years!

Admit it: your customers already interact with brands like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. Hence, they know what a great personalized consumer journey feels like. And if you wish to engage them, you must deliver a similar kind of experience.

Let’s uncover the aspects of a robust CIAM and how it helps enhance user engagement for thriving overall business success.

The Significance of User Engagement

If you think user engagement is just another buzzword, you’re unfortunately wrong! User engagement is the lifeblood of modern digital businesses regardless of the business niche.

Whether you’re running an e-commerce store, a media outlet, or a SaaS provider, the success of your digital presence undoubtedly hinges on the ability to keep your users interested, satisfied, and loyal. High user engagement contributes to a myriad of benefits, including improved customer retention, brand advocacy, and, ultimately, enhancing revenue streams.

However, in a digital-first era where consumers have countless options, standing out and making users feel valued seems an uphill battle. So, how do you make them feel special? Well, the answer lies in personalization!

The Power of Personalization

Personalization isn’t just about greeting your users with their names. It’s a lot more than that. It’s the art of delivering tailored experiences, interactions, and content harmonizing with each user’s preferences and needs.

Moreover, personalization creates a profound connection and relevance when done correctly, making your users feel seen and understood. And this emotional connection is what drives engagement to another level.

Let’s consider this from a real-life example. You get recommendations on platforms like Netflix and Amazon. They’re not random but entirely based on your past preferences, behavior, and demographics.

These platforms leverage data-driven personalization to offer you content and products you’re likely interested in. And thus increasing the chances that you’ll stay engaged and step forward toward purchasing.

How CIAM Acts as a Catalyst for Personalization?

CIAM is an advanced set of tools and techniques that streamline user authentication and authorization while managing millions of customer identities. A CIAM helps businesses deliver seamless user experience backed with robust security that helps companies build lasting relationships with their customers. It also acts as a bridge connecting a user’s identity, preferences, and history with the content or services your organization delivers.

Let’s quickly understand how a CIAM enhances user engagement through personalization:

#1. SSO (Single Sign-On) for Seamless Access

SSO is a game-changer for enhancing customer experiences through a CIAM. It allows users to access multiple services or applications with a single set of credentials, eliminating the friction of remembering various passwords.

With SSO, users can switch between multiple platforms and touchpoints, eventually boosting engagement across your digital ecosystem.

Apart from this, SSO reduces the hassle of reauthentication as it allows quick authentication with just a single click. This improves overall customer retention rates.

#2. User Profiling and Segmentation

With a CIAM working flawlessly in your application and platform, you can collect and analyze customer data, including behavior, demographics, and preferences. By segmenting users into specific groups, enterprises can work on creating effective marketing campaigns.

For instance, an e-commerce platform could eventually send personalized product recommendations based on a user’s purchase history. This improves conversions and overall engagement rates.

Apart from this, user profiling in CIAM can help organizations target customers in the future by grouping a specific category of users. This would help in converting leads into clients.

#3. Consent Management

Though delivering a seamless user experience is essential, ignoring the importance of user privacy could be the worst thing. Remember, respecting user privacy is paramount for online business success.

With CIAM in place, you can incorporate consent management features, allowing your users to control how their data is used. Offering the power to your users to decide what information they share and how it’s utilized is a powerful way to build trust and enhance engagement.

Users are more likely to engage with your products and services when they feel assured that their privacy is respected.

#4. Progressive Profiling

Progressive profiling is another great feature of CIAM that helps boost engagement and minimize customer churn rates.

Instead of bombarding users with lengthy registration forms, enterprises can collect data gradually through progressive profiling within a CIAM. This means users need to share little information about themselves incrementally over time.

With progressive profiling, users are more likely to engage when they’re not overwhelmed by an extensive sign-up process. This further improves customer satisfaction and engagement.

#5. Customized Content Delivery

CIAM enables dynamic content delivery based on user attributes. This means you can easily show content that meets their interests, location, and behavior, and that too in real-time.

Whether it’s news articles, product suggestions based on recent purchases, or advertisements for products that they considered in the past, you can always keep customers engaged and coming back for more.

#6. Omnichannel Engagement

Creating a consistent user experience across all touchpoints is a tough nut to crack. However, with a reliable CIAM, enterprises can create seamless experiences at multiple touchpoints.

Whether it’s a website, mobile app, or social media platform, you can offer a cohesive brand experience that fosters strong engagement and loyalty.

The Road Ahead

User engagement is essential to doing business in today’s modern digital business landscape. And customer identity and access management personalization is the key to overall business success.

A CIAM serves as a powerful enabler of personalization, allowing organizations to deliver tailored experiences that resonate with your potential customers on a personal level.

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TECHNOLOGY

Next-gen chips, Amazon Q, and speedy S3

Published

7 months ago

December 1, 2023

Max

AWS re:Invent, which has been taking place from November 27 and runs to December 1, has had its usual plethora of announcements: a total of 21 at time of print.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the huge potential impact of generative AI – ChatGPT officially turns one year old today – a lot of focus has been on the AI side for AWS’ announcements, including a major partnership inked with NVIDIA across infrastructure, software, and services.

Yet there has been plenty more announced at the Las Vegas jamboree besides. Here, CloudTech rounds up the best of the rest:

Next-generation chips

This was the other major AI-focused announcement at re:Invent: the launch of two new chips, AWS Graviton4 and AWS Trainium2, for training and running AI and machine learning (ML) models, among other customer workloads. Graviton4 shapes up against its predecessor with 30% better compute performance, 50% more cores and 75% more memory bandwidth, while Trainium2 delivers up to four times faster training than before and will be able to be deployed in EC2 UltraClusters of up to 100,000 chips.

The EC2 UltraClusters are designed to ‘deliver the highest performance, most energy efficient AI model training infrastructure in the cloud’, as AWS puts it. With it, customers will be able to train large language models in ‘a fraction of the time’, as well as double energy efficiency.

As ever, AWS offers customers who are already utilising these tools. Databricks, Epic and SAP are among the companies cited as using the new AWS-designed chips.

Zero-ETL integrations

AWS announced new Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Relational Database Services (Amazon RDS) for MySQL integrations with Amazon Redshift, AWS’ cloud data warehouse. The zero-ETL integrations – eliminating the need to build ETL (extract, transform, load) data pipelines – make it easier to connect and analyse transactional data across various relational and non-relational databases in Amazon Redshift.

A simple example of how zero-ETL functions can be seen is in a hypothetical company which stores transactional data – time of transaction, items bought, where the transaction occurred – in a relational database, but use another analytics tool to analyse data in a non-relational database. To connect it all up, companies would previously have to construct ETL data pipelines which are a time and money sink.

The latest integrations “build on AWS’s zero-ETL foundation… so customers can quickly and easily connect all of their data, no matter where it lives,” the company said.

Amazon S3 Express One Zone

AWS announced the general availability of Amazon S3 Express One Zone, a new storage class purpose-built for customers’ most frequently-accessed data. Data access speed is up to 10 times faster and request costs up to 50% lower than standard S3. Companies can also opt to collocate their Amazon S3 Express One Zone data in the same availability zone as their compute resources.

Companies and partners who are using Amazon S3 Express One Zone include ChaosSearch, Cloudera, and Pinterest.

Amazon Q

A new product, and an interesting pivot, again with generative AI at its core. Amazon Q was announced as a ‘new type of generative AI-powered assistant’ which can be tailored to a customer’s business. “Customers can get fast, relevant answers to pressing questions, generate content, and take actions – all informed by a customer’s information repositories, code, and enterprise systems,” AWS added. The service also can assist companies building on AWS, as well as companies using AWS applications for business intelligence, contact centres, and supply chain management.

Customers cited as early adopters include Accenture, BMW and Wunderkind.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

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TECHNOLOGY

HCLTech and Cisco create collaborative hybrid workplaces

Published

7 months ago

November 29, 2023

Max

Digital comms specialist Cisco and global tech firm HCLTech have teamed up to launch Meeting-Rooms-as-a-Service (MRaaS).

Available on a subscription model, this solution modernises legacy meeting rooms and enables users to join meetings from any meeting solution provider using Webex devices.

The MRaaS solution helps enterprises simplify the design, implementation and maintenance of integrated meeting rooms, enabling seamless collaboration for their globally distributed hybrid workforces.

Rakshit Ghura, senior VP and Global head of digital workplace services, HCLTech, said: “MRaaS combines our consulting and managed services expertise with Cisco’s proficiency in Webex devices to change the way employees conceptualise, organise and interact in a collaborative environment for a modern hybrid work model.

“The common vision of our partnership is to elevate the collaboration experience at work and drive productivity through modern meeting rooms.”

Alexandra Zagury, VP of partner managed and as-a-Service Sales at Cisco, said: “Our partnership with HCLTech helps our clients transform their offices through cost-effective managed services that support the ongoing evolution of workspaces.

“As we reimagine the modern office, we are making it easier to support collaboration and productivity among workers, whether they are in the office or elsewhere.”

Cisco’s Webex collaboration devices harness the power of artificial intelligence to offer intuitive, seamless collaboration experiences, enabling meeting rooms with smart features such as meeting zones, intelligent people framing, optimised attendee audio and background noise removal, among others.

Tags: Cisco, collaboration, HCLTech, Hybrid, meetings

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TECHNOLOGY

Canonical releases low-touch private cloud MicroCloud

Published

7 months ago

November 28, 2023

Max

Canonical has announced the general availability of MicroCloud, a low-touch, open source cloud solution. MicroCloud is part of Canonical’s growing cloud infrastructure portfolio.

It is purpose-built for scalable clusters and edge deployments for all types of enterprises. It is designed with simplicity, security and automation in mind, minimising the time and effort to both deploy and maintain it. Conveniently, enterprise support for MicroCloud is offered as part of Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro subscription, with several support tiers available, and priced per node.

MicroClouds are optimised for repeatable and reliable remote deployments. A single command initiates the orchestration and clustering of various components with minimal involvement by the user, resulting in a fully functional cloud within minutes. This simplified deployment process significantly reduces the barrier to entry, putting a production-grade cloud at everyone’s fingertips.

Juan Manuel Ventura, head of architectures & technologies at Spindox, said: “Cloud computing is not only about technology, it’s the beating heart of any modern industrial transformation, driving agility and innovation. Our mission is to provide our customers with the most effective ways to innovate and bring value; having a complexity-free cloud infrastructure is one important piece of that puzzle. With MicroCloud, the focus shifts away from struggling with cloud operations to solving real business challenges” says

In addition to seamless deployment, MicroCloud prioritises security and ease of maintenance. All MicroCloud components are built with strict confinement for increased security, with over-the-air transactional updates that preserve data and roll back on errors automatically. Upgrades to newer versions are handled automatically and without downtime, with the mechanisms to hold or schedule them as needed.

With this approach, MicroCloud caters to both on-premise clouds but also edge deployments at remote locations, allowing organisations to use the same infrastructure primitives and services wherever they are needed. It is suitable for business-in-branch office locations or industrial use inside a factory, as well as distributed locations where the focus is on replicability and unattended operations.

Cedric Gegout, VP of product at Canonical, said: “As data becomes more distributed, the infrastructure has to follow. Cloud computing is now distributed, spanning across data centres, far and near edge computing appliances. MicroCloud is our answer to that.

“By packaging known infrastructure primitives in a portable and unattended way, we are delivering a simpler, more prescriptive cloud experience that makes zero-ops a reality for many Industries.“

MicroCloud’s lightweight architecture makes it usable on both commodity and high-end hardware, with several ways to further reduce its footprint depending on your workload needs. In addition to the standard Ubuntu Server or Desktop, MicroClouds can be run on Ubuntu Core – a lightweight OS optimised for the edge. With Ubuntu Core, MicroClouds are a perfect solution for far-edge locations with limited computing capabilities. Users can choose to run their workloads using Kubernetes or via system containers. System containers based on LXD behave similarly to traditional VMs but consume fewer resources while providing bare-metal performance.

Coupled with Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro + Support subscription, MicroCloud users can benefit from an enterprise-grade open source cloud solution that is fully supported and with better economics. An Ubuntu Pro subscription offers security maintenance for the broadest collection of open-source software available from a single vendor today. It covers over 30k packages with a consistent security maintenance commitment, and additional features such as kernel livepatch, systems management at scale, certified compliance and hardening profiles enabling easy adoption for enterprises. With per-node pricing and no hidden fees, customers can rest assured that their environment is secure and supported without the expensive price tag typically associated with cloud solutions.

Tags: automation, Canonical, MicroCloud, private cloud

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