Consent Management: What You Need to Understand

What Consent Management Is and Why It Matters

The identity landscape has never been more complicated, with emerging security threats, new privacy regulations, and high expectations for a user experience that’s both seamless and secure. Identity and access management (IAM) solutions allow companies to secure their technology perimeters, streamline UX, get deeper insights into customer behavior, and power commerce and conversion.

Consent management — a process that guides compliance by informing users about data collection and usage practices — is tightly coupled with IAM. Consent management logs and tracks consent collection to guide compliance with privacy regulations like the GDPR and CCPA.

As of 2020, 66% of countries are covered by data privacy regulations, and the percentage is growing. Understandably, consent management is top-of-mind for plenty of companies, but it’s not a challenge you have to face alone.

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Consent management platforms

Consent management platforms (CMP) allow brands to automate the consent management process, making GDPR compliance seamless and allowing companies to focus on their core competencies rather than devoting time and resources to consent collection and management.

Read on to understand the value of consent management platforms and how the ecosystem of solutions on Auth0 Marketplace can help you manage consent securely and with minimal friction.

The ROI of Consent Management

The ROI of consent management lies in its ability to take the time-consuming, resource-intensive process of consent collection off your developers’ plate, so they can focus on supporting your core business functions. The right consent management platform allows companies to:

• Guide compliance with privacy regulations like the GDPR and CCPA, avoiding expensive penalties and damage to brand reputation.
• Bolster their security posture without compromising their ability to deliver a seamless customer experience.
• Save developer time and increase focus on core competencies instead of supporting homegrown identity solutions.
• Gain deeper, more specific insights into customers’ habits and needs.

Make Consent Management a Competitive Advantage

While pressure to comply with consent requirements has inspired consternation at some companies, other organizations view their ability to protect customer data as a competitive advantage. The fact is, being transparent about how you collect, store, and leverage first-party data builds trust with consumers.

The right approach to consent management can also stimulate innovation by allowing your developers to focus on what they do best, rather than devoting time and effort to propping up a legacy solution that’s non-compliant anyway. Furthermore, consent management allows you to draw on deeper insights into your customers’ behavior and buying priorities, which helps you make better decisions and deliver more value to your customers.

Let’s look more closely at the business value of managing consent.

Power Digital Transformation

The right consent management system enables digital transformation initiatives at scale without compromising privacy and security. In order to leverage customer data — often considered a company’s most valuable asset — in furtherance of digital transformation efforts, it’s essential to cement consumer trust in your data protection practices. A digital transformation strategy that doesn’t include IAM and consent management is less likely to succeed.

Consent management is a way for companies to demonstrate their compliance with privacy regulations and consent requirements, so consumers know they can trust you to collect, store, and use their data properly. Here’s another way to think about it: Consent management connects business needs with consumer concerns and builds a trusting digital relationship between the two.

Protect against data breaches

You already know that adopting the right security measures throughout your infrastructure can help you avoid data breaches. What you may not realize is that implementing consent management to prevent identity and access management (IAM) permission errors is an important step in protecting against breaches.

In a recent IDC survey of 300 CISOs, 61% percent said that identity and access management (IAM) permission errors were a top concern. The same study found that 80% of companies had experienced at least one cloud data breach in the last 18 months. Almost half (43%) reported experiencing ten or more breaches. Solid consent management practices can help you avoid the kinds of IAM permission errors that open the door to a data breach.

Guide compliance and build trust

The GDPR, CCPA, and other privacy regulations require companies to apply new levels of scrutiny to their privacy and security practices. According to Gartner, these regulations drove at least 10% of market demand for security services, including identity and access management (IAM), in 2019. A modern understanding of data protection that foregrounds the importance of consent management allows companies to achieve compliance while building trust in their brands.

Compliance is critical not only because no one wants to suffer a data breach or be slapped with a fine, but also because consumers show a marked preference for brands they feel will safeguard their data. A majority of UK consumers (57%) report being more likely to do business with a company that demonstrates its GDPR compliance with a seal or badge. One in three people (34%) report trusting companies to store and leverage customer data, up from just one in five in 2017. Being transparent about what information you collect and how you store it augments user trust while helping you comply with privacy regulations.

Centralize consent data to drive better insights

Multiple stakeholders in your organization, including marketing, data governance, risk, and CRM, rely on customer data to meet their goals. Legal and compliance teams certainly need access to consent collection data to do their jobs. Only rarely, however, do these teams have a centralized database to draw from. Most organizations collect and store data in silos, with duplicate records that cannot be merged across multiple databases.

Here are some of the challenges associated with not centralizing consent data:

• Consent records are stored across multiple, duplicate records containing conflicting data.
• There’s no common taxonomy between records, so reading them requires manual intervention.
• Linking customer consent and preferences to external systems like CRM without the benefits of a centralized consent database is complex, time-consuming, and fraught with error.

Centralizing customer data with a consent management platform allows everyone who needs to access up-to-date consent data to do so. Taking consent data out of silos and centralizing it on one platform makes your company more compliant and efficient.

Manage Consent With Auth0 Marketplace

No one company offers a consent management solution so comprehensive that it meets every conceivable business need and makes every other solution redundant. That’s why extensibility is so critical. Extensibility describes a system’s capacity to support future growth. It refers to the ability to extend a system to support new functionalities and use cases, as well as the level of effort required to implement those extensions. An inherently extensible platform like Auth0 empowers users to tailor identity flows with custom code and integrate with third-party solutions to meet enterprise needs.

To some extent, the SaaS model is predicated on the assumption that it’s better to utilize the services of a dedicated expert in a particular arena than to build from scratch a solution to a problem that’s already been solved. In keeping with this approach, Auth0 Marketplace allows developers to leverage third-party consent management integrations to solve their nuanced, evolving identity challenges.

The Auth0 platform has robust, GDPR-compliant consent management solutions. Opening up our platform to third-party, partner-built integrations accelerates innovation for Auth0, our customers, and our partners. This ecosystem also gives our customers the tools they need to build a consent framework that solves the range of use cases they encounter. Developers get more integrations to support more use cases, and vendors have more opportunities to capture business and deliver value. For vendors who haven’t yet built integrations with Auth0, Marketplace gives them that opportunity.

Meet the Consent Management Experts

Auth0’s marketplace of third-party integrations allows developers to build identity solutions with an improved discovery and installation experience. The partnerships we’ve formed can help our customers solve their consent management challenges. Here are our launch partners whose integrations help customers meet their consent requirements by obtaining and maintaining consent collection records.

OneTrust

OneTrust is a leading platform for operationalizing privacy, security, and governance. More than 6,000 customers of all sizes, including Aetna, Oracle, and Akamai, rely on OneTrust to guide compliance with the CCPA, GDPR, LGPD, PDPA, ISO27001, and other privacy and security laws around the world.

MyLife Digital

MyLife Digital develops solutions to consolidate and centralize customer data, giving you a single source of truth to help you build authentic, value-driven relationships through personalized communications that drive opt-ins, increase engagement, and guide compliance with data privacy regulations.

Meeting Tomorrow’s Identity Needs

Auth0 Marketplace will solve the identity needs of today and tomorrow. The fact that we’re recruiting best-in-class partners to innovate on our platform signals that Auth0 will be capable of meeting your needs today and your needs in the future — needs yet to be identified.

To learn how to integrate with our consent management partners, start with this blog post.