New features from Descope strike the balance between user experience and security
Descope, the drag-and-drop customer identity and access management (CIAM) platform, is unveiling a variety of new advancements designed to enhance the customer experiences of ecommerce and online retail companies. From newfound support for Google One Tap to a new WordPress Plugin, Descope’s latest capabilities help deliver secure, personalized, and omnichannel authentication experiences to end customers, according to the company.
Striking the balance between user experience and security—and doing so without introducing overwhelming resource drains on engineering teams—is a difficult task. While inefficiencies for the end user is proving to impact the bottom line—a report from FIDO Alliance found that 47% of users abandoned an online purchase because they forgot their password—credential-based attacks continue to be one of the most common causes for data breaches, according to Verizon research.
Seeking to alleviate these pains, the Descope no-/low-code CIAM platform empowers enterprises to easily create and configure their authentication and user journeys within a visual workflow setting. Helping to reduce friction during onboarding, increase protection against account takeover attacks, and centralize identities across customer-facing apps, Descope finds the “sweet spot” of authentication, security, and great user experience.
In its ongoing commitment to secure, positive end user journeys, Descope is introducing support for Google One Tap, a capability that prompts users to sign-in or sign-up with an enterprise’s website via the user’s Google Account. This eliminates the need for users to remember or enter any credentials, improving conversion rates, reducing cognitive load on users, and delivering unified authentication experiences across web and mobile apps, according to Descope.
This announcement also debuts the Descope WordPress plugin, a plugin that brings the secure, frictionless, enterprise-grade authentication, multi-factor authentication (MFA), and single sign-on (SSO) capabilities of the Descope platform to WordPress websites and storefronts.
“The UX [user experience]-security tug of war is never more apparent than in the world of ecommerce and retail apps,” said Rishi Bhargava, co-founder of Descope. “Descope’s goal is to help our customers turn ‘UX or security’ into ‘UX and security.’ We’re excited for ecommerce customers to adopt features like Google One Tap, our WordPress plugin, and passkeys to make auth easier for end users and to make attacks harder for cybercriminals.”
To prevent static customer identity systems, Descope is introducing A/B testing capabilities designed to allow customers to run user journey experiments without impacting the app codebase. Descope is also continuing its support for passkeys, enabling customers to implement different passkey styles in days—not months. Users can augment existing CIAM systems with passkeys, enable passkey autofill for returning users, cross-device passkeys, and more.
“Descope’s flexible workflow approach has helped us add strong, phishing-resistant WebAuthn authentication when end-user hardware and software support it and fall back on other MFA options when it can't be supported,” said Arkadiy Goykhberg, CISO at Branch Insurance, a Descope customer. “Visualizing the user journey as a workflow enables us to audit and modify the registration and authentication journey without making significant code changes.”
To learn more about Descope’s latest innovations, please visit https://www.descope.com/.