What is Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM)?

The solutions themselves consist of several functionalities:

• Customer registration
• Self-service account management
• Consent and preference management
• Single sign-on (SSO)
• Multi-factor authentication (MFA)
• Access management
• Directory services and data access governance

CIAM solutions ensure a smooth customer journey without compromising security. Depending on the solution, it can be deployed on-premises, in the cloud, or via the identity-as-a-service (IDaaS) platform. In some cases, they can be encoded within APIs or function as standalone modules for better application support.

Key takeaways

• CIAM offers improved user experiences, robust data protection, compliance support, and detailed analytics for decision-making.
• Essential elements of CIAM include high scalability, single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, and centralized user management.
• For customers, CIAM ensures a secure and personalized online experience without infringing on privacy.
• For businesses, CIAM enhances security, helps prevent data breaches, and increases customer satisfaction and conversions.

Why is CIAM important?

CIAM solves several problems associated with online business applications. However, the benefits extend to both businesses and customers.

For customers

With the CIAM solutions, businesses can tailor their customer experience to each user without invading their privacy. This means that customers can manage their consent for data usage and privacy preferences, giving or withdrawing it for specific activities.

In turn, by capturing available customer profile data (behaviour patterns, preferences, or purchase history), companies can craft personalized experiences for them, such as tailored product recommendations.

For businesses

Personalizing customer experiences and enabling their control over their identities via the CIAM system means businesses can build long-lasting relationships with their clients. But that’s not all; this system also reduces fraud and abuse by verifying users before giving them access to the company’s systems or data using MFA and behaviour analytics.

It also allows businesses to comply with regulations such as GDPR, ensuring that their customer data is properly protected.

Benefits of CIAM

Developed to improve the customer experience and ensure the highest level of security, CIAM plays an important part in modern business life, providing key benefits such as:

• Identity and access management. It involves creating and managing user identities and profiles, such as user registration or updates. So, customer identity solutions relieve businesses’ burden regarding digital customer identities and their access. This makes it possible to supervise user identities securely.
• Customer data protection. Unfortunately, people tend to reuse their passwords for most service accounts. CIAM solutions solve this by adding multifactor authentication for extra security. Multifactor authentication simply means security that goes beyond passwords, requiring users to provide two or more additional pieces of identification, such as a security token or biometrics, to access a system or application.
• Seamless user experience. CIAM solutions work to bring a frictionless experience to the end user. For example, they enable customers to access applications and websites across apps, gadgets, sites, and other digital environments. Additionally, some third-party providers, such as social media websites, allow users to import their profile details, including credentials, from them instead of creating accounts from scratch.
• Better customization. Most CIAM systems allow businesses to tailor user experiences for registration, login, and other tasks. CIAMs will also include implementing different multifactor authentication methods for extra layers of security. Lastly, they can adapt to the company's brand identity and feel.
• Multichannel support. One of the biggest benefits of CIAMs is multichannel support, which allows customers to experience personalized interactions across their various digital channels. This includes websites, mobile applications, and other devices like smartwatches. No matter what method your users choose, they will get the same streamlined and consistent experience.
• Account self-service. Instead of relying on manual approvals, CIAM solutions enable users to manage their credentials, such as resetting passwords, updating profile information, or managing subscriptions. This reduces the load on the customer support team and allows customers to conveniently manage their digital lives.
• Easier compliance. CIAM helps you meet data protection regulations and other privacy laws by ensuring consent management and establishing robust data governance practices. For instance, such a solution can help your company obtain HIPAA and ISO certification.
• In-depth analytics. No business decision can be made without data to back it up. CIAMs can be valuable for gathering customer data and gaining insights into their behaviors, preferences, and trends. You can then use this data to tailor content for your customers or create a targeted marketing campaign.
• Improve scalability. CIAM systems can support a high volume of customer identities and adapt to dynamic environments requiring much flexibility. Its ability to integrate with various applications can support the growth of your business's digital service and adapt to customer demands.

How does CIAM protect customer data

CIAM is built to secure customer data during its journey by helping out its clients in two major ways.

Minimizing data breach risk

Implementing strong security measures and empowering customers to control their data make CIAM one of the first lines of defence when mitigating data breaches. Such platforms offer encryption, tokenization, and extra security via MFA to ensure that only authorized users can access the account's sensitive data. In addition, CIAM solutions ensure that only necessary customer data is collected, reducing the amount of stored data.

Helps to better secure data against fraud

Fraudulent app activities usually happen through false sign-ups, when malicious actors access apps using fake accounts. Or through account takeovers, when threat actors steal customer accounts by using credentials from previous data breaches or obtaining them via phishing campaigns.

CIAM systems allow companies to enforce that only users with the right identifiers, such as social login or biometric authentication, can access their accounts. This reduces fraudulent sign-ups. Similarly, some CIAMs can help prevent account takeovers by notifying users and your company’s admins when anomalous activity occurs on the user’s account.

Important elements of CIAM

CIAM offers many possibilities for businesses. Yet to be a good fit, the solution must meet certain criteria.

High scalability

CIAM solutions provide users with unparalleled flexibility in terms of scale. A large number of customers can be served at the same time. Therefore, if your business is booming, your clients won’t be stuck in queues.

Single sign-on (SSO)

SSO allows customers to avoid multiple authentication rounds when logging in to your services or applications. As identity-as-a-service (IDaaS) constitutes an important part of knowing your customer, this allows controlling user authentication in greater detail, creating more efficient and secure authorization mechanisms.

Multi-factor authentication (MFA)

MFA is an additional reassurance that the logging user truly is what it claims to be. Additional factors like security questions, biometric data, or one-time passcodes help to increase reassurance and the threshold of entry. Simultaneously this login method can incorporate adaptive authentication checking additional external factors like time of day, device, etc. This helps flag the login for any abnormal customer behavior that could indicate the user’s account is breached.

Centralized user management

Various jurisdictions around the world strictly regulate customer data access. CIAM solutions help businesses to limit customer data availability. In addition, customer identity management reduces various risks of customer data exposure.

CIAM use cases

CIAM solutions are mainly geared towards these four use cases.

• Improvement of knowing your customer procedures. Most modern marketing tools can indicate that the user has signed on without telling you anything else about that person. In contrast, CIAM solutions provide a much more in-depth overview of the customer’s journey.
• UX customization. Deeper knowledge about your customers can be incredibly useful as it makes your improvement strategy more sound. In addition, this opens the door to customizing the experience according to their habits or usage patterns, making conversions easier.
• Strengthening of data security. Data breaches can be devastating for most businesses not only because of the fines for leaking private customer data. This also means that customers will often turn to the competitor just because of their cleaner track record. Therefore, a key priority is laying out a good foundation for customer data handling and CIAM helps to achieve that.
• Marketing data streamlining. Having a single marketing data tunnel helps to have everything in one place. Otherwise, the insights could be lost as they’re scattered across different tracking platforms. CIAM helps to structure data conveniently and provides various useful metrics for analysts.

What is the difference between IAM and CIAM?

Identity and Access Management (IAM) and CIAM systems manage user identities and control access to resources: they govern authentication, authorisation, and user management. Both solutions integrate with different systems, applications, and directories to enable seamless user authentication. Additionally, they both ensure compliance with data protection regulations by offering security measures to protect user identities.

IAM is a broad discipline enabling authorized individuals to access needed digital materials. This means IAM software combines various security features with complex authorization systems across many applications.