By Jay Malin, Managing Director
Confirming identity is critical to ensuring data and system integrity when a customer wishes to secure services or employees and contractors wish to access critical infrastructure. Some organizations mistakenly believe they addressed the issue of identity adequately by moving from a centralized identity model that has served them well for decades, to a federated model that leverages SSO and/or multifactor authentication.
However, this only served to reduce the frustrating set of credentials required for the end user and did not entirely resolve the issue. Despite numerous Internet breakthroughs, there was no single way to establish and verify identity except those shown on the left in Figure 1.
But recently there have been efforts to create Internet identity protection via the World Wide Web Consortium by using advances in distributed ledger technology (DLT), commonly referred to as Blockchain. This led to the realization of secure, immediate decentralized identifiers (DID). This form of identity is established by an entity on the Internet and is memorialized on Blockchain. Essentially what DID does is allowing any entity, whether individual, company, or device to establish a self-sovereign identity that is accessed by a secure digital key.
Digital identity not only helps to authenticate your users, it also enables new service offerings around identity. Some examples include energy trading credits, prosumer business models, and EV loyalty programs. The customer’s digital identity, which may include verification of their home utility, will allow a customer to easily authenticate their identity at a public EV charging station and purchase energy from 3rd parties and suppliers at negotiated network rates. Blockchain avoids the central clearinghouse for providers, users, and partner programs.
Please contact us for a copy of our whitepaper on ‘Blockchain for Customer Engagement’, as well as our whitepaper on ‘Customer Preference Management’.