What is CIAM?
Customer identity and access management (CIAM) is a technology that helps organizations manage all customer identification and ensure customers have seamless access to the service or application. It is also responsible for controlling the customer’s access to specific parts of the network or application and ensuring all the data is kept safely.
CIAM is also designated as a technology that helps organizations manage digital interaction with customers through sign-up and access to applications or digital services. It acts as an identity layer that is implemented by organizations on consumer applications or services.
This solution also dictates how an organization collects, manages, analyzes, and securely stores all the data of its end users. It amalgamates security, analytics, and customer experience to ensure customers can easily sign up and sign in, leading to high loyalty.
To ensure minimal friction, CIAM also integrates account management, MFA, SSO, access management, identity proofing, and customer registration.
By implementing CIAM, an organization can not only identify their users but also provide a curated access experience and provide the right access to the application. Most importantly, it streamlines the process of following compliance requirements of different industry regulations.
Importance of CIAM
The CIAM solution plays a major role in an organization to provide users with an enhanced experience while protecting them from any kind of theft and privacy violation.
It helps the organization keep the application, data, system and network secured while maintaining smooth digital interaction with customers to meet their needs. This technology is also known for integrating back-end systems in a single chain and helping end-users access all the required services.
CIAM lays the path to the very first user’s digital interaction with the organization’s service or application through sign-in or sign-up. Every customer using a service or application expects a personalized and secure interaction at every stage.
That is why organizations across various industries are using CIAM to ensure a personalized experience for each customer and ensure high retention. It creates a platform to enable organizations to cater to customers’ requirements while they access the service from a smartphone, computer, or smart device.
It provides the organization with all the necessary customer data and insights, thus helping them to understand the behavior and preferences to provide curated services. CIAM servers as the driving force that helps in building customer trust and ensuring high customer retention.
Since CIAM determines the customer experience and how customers interact with the service, it has become an important requirement for every organization. Here is an overview of key factors that make CIAM an important tool in today’s business growth:
Personalized and Smooth Customer Experience
When a CIAM is implemented, it collects all the customer data to create a customer profile involving preferences, interaction behavior, and other insights. Based on the insight, it creates a personalized experience that makes the digital interaction engaging and makes the customer come back.
Enhanced Brand Experience
CIAM expands the reach of organizations to anywhere and curates the experience. It also provides them the medium to share necessary information across the digital platform.
Data Protection
Besides offering an engaging customer experience, CIAM also makes sure all the customer’s data is protected from any kind of fraud. It helps in building a strong trust by securely storing all the personal data and preventing any kind of malicious attack during digital interaction. It prioritizes MFA and strict access control so that customer data is protected at all costs.
Reduced Operation Cost
When it comes to the implementation and maintenance of the CIAM tool, it doesn’t require much capital. Moreover, it reduces the overall operation cost by reducing the customer support cost.
Easy Customer Authentication Integration
CIAM offers an organization with REST APIs, widgets, and SDKs which makes it simpler for developers to integrate customer authentication and authorization into applications. The tools also enable the developer to create a branded login page and social login.
How is CIAM Different From IAM?
CIAM and IAM are two important technologies that are used by organizations to manage user access to the system, application, network, and services. In many aspects, CIAM and IAM utilize username, password, MFA, and other measures for authentication.
However, they are two different tools where CIAM is used to cater to customers’ demand for a seamless experience and secure digital interaction.
In contrast, IAM is designed to cater to employees of an organization by providing safe access to the application, internal system, and networks. Unlike CIAM, IAM doesn’t always focus on providing a seamless experience and convenient usage.
IAM doesn’t have much issue when it comes to safeguarding all the information of the user it provides access to. Since IAM is mostly used for catering employees, it doesn’t have to store the information.
When an employee accesses any specific area of the network, IAM provides them a username and biometric for access. When the user gets an entry, they get access to the network along with resources. However, they won’t have to provide any personal information while they access it.
But for CIAM, the process is quite different as customers while accessing the application or network have to store some personal information. CIAM uses the customer to amplify the user experience and also use it for product engagement and business strategy.
What Problem Does CIAM Solve in Your Organization?
When it comes to solving various business issues associated with customer identity, CIAM serves as the best choice for every organization. Whether it is an issue related to performance, customer engagement, user experience, or regulatory compliance, CIAM helps organizations in many ways.
Every organization having customer-facing services and applications faces an issue with the security of customer data. Any mishap with customer data can not only hamper the business operation but also lead to a loss in customer trust and regulatory penalties.
However, CIAM helps organizations solve the issue by maintaining the integrity and security of the data.
It offers fraud detection and other preventive controls while maintaining adherence to regulatory standards. A CIAM becomes a necessary protective layer that ensures the digital interaction between customer and application is completely safeguarded.
The CIAM solution also actively addresses the issue of scalability and performance. The tariff pattern and customer interaction with the application are never fixed.
In certain situations, the application also might have to scale the total number of transactions happening per minute and support the identity of millions of customers. The fluctuation in the number of customer identities can be overwhelming for the application but CIAM streamlines the issues.
Other major issues solved by CIAM are the poor user experience, low retention, and cumbersome sign-up & sign-in process.
Many applications, especially e-commerce sites, lose potential customers due to lengthy customer onboarding processes. However, the CIAM solution makes the sign-in and sign-up process frictionless by enabling developers to create a quick authentication process.
Another major issue many organizations face is implementing appropriate customer engagement to ensure customers have a great experience during the interaction. Many organizations get perplexed by the type of engagement required, the implementation process, and what would be the impact.
CIAM by offering observation functionality and getting insight from customer information helps the organization create a better personalized customer experience. Moreover, the insight enables developers to streamline the targeted campaigns, offer personalized experiences, and understand which service to offer.
What are the Primary Benefits of CIAM in an Organization?
When an organization implements CIAM, they are benefited from CIAM in many ways. Here are some primary benefits that a CIAM offers:
Seamless Sign-Up and Sign-In Experience
CIAM ensures the sign-up and sign-in process in the application or service is completely smooth. The CIAM enables the developer to create an authentication process where customers can log in with their social identity or mail.
It spares them from furnishing a long list of details during sign-up. Similarly, CIAM also streamlines the sign-in experience of customers who already have an account. Some CIAMs also enable customers to sign in to the application without requiring a password.
Robust Data Protection
One of the biggest benefits of CIAM is that it protects all customer data by implementing various access controls. It prevents any random authentication to the network resources, thus preventing exploitation. CIAM also enables customers to take control of the data they share and they can make modifications according to their needs.
Enhances Customer Trust
CIAM tightens security control and helps organizations comply with all the necessary industry regulations and frameworks. As a result, it provides the customers the assurance that their personal information and payment details are safeguarded.
Helps Understand the Customer
A useful feature of CIAM is that it gathers insight from customer data and their digital interaction. It assesses their usage pattern, behavior, preferences, type of engagement, and other details to understand the customer. They integrate these details into business intelligence to deliver better customer experience and service.
Simple Account Recovery
When a customer forgets the credentials, they won’t have to go through a lengthy process to recover the account. CIAM streamlines the account recovery and enables them to quickly get back the account. The customer just has to provide the verified identifiers to recover the account.
Maintains a Balance Between Security and Accessibility
Optimum security and smooth accessibility is a requirement for every customer. CIAM helps cater to these requirements by striking the right balance between security and accessibility. It enables the organization to ensure an impressive user experience without compromising on security. It implements adaptive authentication that boosts the sign-in experience.
Support Varied Regulatory Standards
Another great feature of the CIAM solution is that it supports different regulatory standards and frameworks. Whether your organization needs to adhere to HIPAA, GDPR, SOC, PCI DSS, or ISO 9001, CIAM aligns the security measures.
Lifecycle Management
When you implement a CIAM solution, it allows you to take control of various aspects of the identity management process.
From registering a new customer to unlocking an identity and deactivating a specific one, CIAM gives you complete visibility across all identities. It eases up the process of a gradual increase in the number of customer sign-ups while duplicate identities are deleted.
What are the Primary Capabilities of CIAM?
Usually, people associate CIAM with user sign-in and customer retention. However, CIAM is more than that. A CIAM is equipped with a lot of primary capabilities and they are:
Authentication and Authorization
Authentication and authorization define a CIAM solution. It provides the organization with information about who is logging into the application and makes modifications accordingly.
Authorization ensures that the customer has the right to use the application or services with proper transparency. It provides the organization with the assurance that customers are authenticated and authorized properly before being given access.
Complete User Management
CIAM is responsible for managing the digital identity of every customer who signs in. They are also responsible for managing the lifecycle of every customer without requiring them to go through any hassle. Importantly, it puts customer identity management up to the customers, enabling organizations to use their resources on other stuff.
Application Interoperability and Extensibility
CIAM comes with the appropriate interoperability and extensibility which enables them to integrate with technologies like OAuth 2.0.
Moreover, the interoperability and extensibility with different technologies help them with various APIs and SDKs. Since customers will interact and engage in your application, it is vital that CIAM has the appropriate interoperability.
Single Sign-On
A proper CIAM solution treats all the customers with a single sign-on or SSO experience, enabling them to use various digital properties with a seamless login process.
SSO experience is achieved using Identity-as-a-services or IDaaS. It not only allows the administrators to administer the authentication process but also their access level to the service or application.
Support For Standard-Based Identity Providers
A vital feature that makes the CIAM solution stand out is that it supports standards-based identity providers like OpenID Connect.
It allows the organization to handle identification processes related to business to business to consumer. The CIAM solution with support for SAML 2.0 clearly makes the organization eligible to handle different kinds of B2B2C sign-in processes.
Deep Data Analytics
From gathering information on sign-in transactions, and response to campaigns, to buying patterns, CIAM records all the data when a user digitally interacts with the application.
It uses the data for analysis and utilizes it for business campaigns. These metrics and data analytics help the organization achieve a high retention rate, better user experience, improved engagement, and enhanced conversion rate.
Final Words
CIAM solutions have become a go-to technology for organizations across industries. Organizations offering various types of applications and services to customers are benefiting from CIAM as it streamlines most of the tasks. Not only does it ease up the sign-in & sign-up process but also enhances data protection and lowers the operation cost.
CIAM is loaded with numerous features which makes it an obvious choice for organizations having customer-facing applications and services. If you also have an application and want to streamline the sign-in & sign-up process, CIAM is one of the convenient tools to integrate.
