Customer Identity And Access Management (CIAM) Security Buyers’ Guide 2025

State of the market: Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) solutions enable businesses to provide customers with secure, frictionless access to their services. They help organizations manage customer identities, enforce user authentication, and streamline the user login experience.

• The global CIAM market was estimated at USD 8.12 billion in 2023. It’s expected to grow at a CAGR of 17.4% between 2024 and 2030 to reach a value of approximately USD 21 billion.
• Growth is being driven by the increasing need for businesses to offer customers access to their services digitally or risk losing out to their competitors.
  • “The pandemic drove a lot of businesses across many different industries to double down and start focusing on their digital interactions with their customers, with their business partners, and with their employees.” – Jason Keenaghan, Thales.
  • As organizations embrace digital transformation by supporting online transactions, they become exposed to a) online fraud and b) cyberthreats that steal their customers’ login credentials and financial data.
  • “Digital first […] means providing secure remote authentication for their customers.” – Joe Palmer, iProov.
• Regulatory scrutiny is also contributing to market growth, with organizations in heavily regulated industries such as healthcare, finance, and manufacturing having to secure customers’ information to avoid hefty compliance fines.
• CIAM solutions not only streamline user registration and login processes, but also protect customer identities and ensure that only legitimate, authenticated customers are accessing your services, protecting you against fraud.
• As the market continues to grow, we’re seeing an increasing demand for CIAM tools to deliver more seamless user experiences for both businesses and their customers.
  • In response to this, we can expect to see CIAM solutions to continue integrating AI and ML to provide adaptive authentication. We may also see an increase in the popularity of managed CIAM services.

Why trust us: We’ve researched, demoed, and tested several leading CIAM platforms, spoken to organizations of all sizes about their customer verification and access management challenges and the features that are most useful to them, and interviewed executives from leading providers in the identity security space.

You can find our product reviews, interviews, and Top 10 guides to the best CIAM products on the market in our Identity And Access Management Hub.

Our recommendations: Before we jump into the details, here are our top tips on how to get the most out of your CIAM implementation:

• For maximum user retention: Prioritize user experience. Make the registration, login, and account management processes as easy as possible, and make sure your solution supports multiple authentication methods (and allows end users to choose the one that’s most convenient for them).
• For data protection: Utilize your solution’s security features to prevent your customers’ accounts from being breached. These will typically include MFA and SSO, and some solutions offer threat detection. However, it’s important to balance security and usability—scroll down to the “Challenges” section for our detailed recommendations on how to do this.
• For achieving compliance: Only collect the minimum required data that you need from your customers. This will not only make it easier for you to meet compliance requirements, but it’ll also help you reduce data collection and storage costs.
• For best practices: Embed CIAM into your application or service as early in the development pipeline as possible. This will not only ensure security from the ground up, but it’ll save you from spending time (and money!) retro-fitting authentication mechanisms at a later stage, when it becomes more complex to do so.

How CIAM works: CIAM solutions are typically deployed in one of three ways: 

1. You can deploy the solution on-prem in your data center. This gives you full control over the solution’s infrastructure, as well as customization and integrations, but it can be complex to set up and expensive to maintain. This makes this method most popular amongst large enterprises with legacy systems. In 2023, on-prem deployments accounted for 62% of the CIAM market revenue share.
2. You can deploy the solution in the cloud by purchasing a CIAM service hosted by a CIAM vendor. Cloud-hosted solutions are quick to deploy, scalable, and are updated and patched by the vendor. However, they’re less customizable and can introduce data sovereignty concerns. The cloud CIAM segment is expected to register the highest CAGR by 2030 (38%).
3.  You can combine on-prem and cloud-based CIAM capabilities to create a hybrid solution. This allows you to balance security and scalability, but it can be more complex to manage.

Once deployed, CIAM tools enable you to authenticate, authorize, and manage end user identities. To achieve this, they combine multiple identity and access security components, which typically include:

• User lifecycle management, which allows you to automate user provisioning and deprovisioning; manage user consent and preferences; and enable self-service account registration, password resets, and profile updates.
• An identity store that securely stores user profiles and authentication credentials.
• Built-in authentication mechanisms to enable multi-factor authentication (inc. biometric and passwordless authentication).
• Federation and single sign-on that enable users to login with third-party identity providers and social logins (e.g., Facebook, Google, Apple ID) via protocols such as OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, and SAML.

The strongest CIAM solutions also use ML-driven anomaly detection and behavioral analytics to analyze the context of each login and compare it to historical user behavior and authentication trends. If a login is deemed suspicious, the solution then requests further authentication. This is called adaptive (or risk-based authentication) and can help prevent fraud, as well as streamline the login experience for legitimate users.

Benefits of CIAM: There are four main benefits to implementing a CIAM solution:

1. Simplify the user registration process.
   • CIAM solutions typically offer a user-friendly interface for account creation, as well as self-service account management (i.e., users can update their contact details, reset their password, etc. without contacting you). 
   • This makes it more likely that they’ll complete the registration for your digital service, rather than finding a different one that’s easier to use!
2. Improve the user login experience.
   • Once a user has signed up to your service, the CIAM tool enables them to access multiple applications via one set of login credentials, eliminating the need for them to remember multiple usernames and passwords.
   • This often includes support for the user to sign in with existing social media or browser credentials, such as their Facebook or Google password.
   • Most CIAM tools also support multiple different authentication methods, enabling users to sign in and verify their identities in whichever way is easiest for them.
   • This streamlined, personalized login process can again help minimize customer turnover. 
   • “You want to ensure you are removing as much friction as possible,” says Jason Keenaghan, Director of Product for IAM at Thales, in an exclusive interview with Expert Insights. “You don’t want drop offs.”
3. Secure your data and your customers’ data.
   • Adding MFA to your customers’ accounts helps protect them against account takeover. Even if a cybercriminal were to guess or steal the customer’s login details, they wouldn’t be able to access their account or any of the data stored in it without putting in a lot of effort to bypass the MFA in place.
   • In the same vein, CIAM tools protect your business data from being stolen by fake or fraudulent accounts.
4. Achieve compliance with regulatory frameworks and industry regulations.  
   • CIAM tools help you meet and prove compliance with frameworks that require you to secure your customers’ data, such as GDPR, PCI-DSS, and HIPAA.
   • They prove that you’re actively taking steps to protect your customers’ identities, while also logging user login activity for auditing purposes.

Common CIAM challenges: There are a few common challenges that you might come across when implementing a CIAM solution. Here’s what they are and how to overcome them:

1. It can be difficult to balance security with usability. Adding authentication to the login process can create friction, which can put customers off using your service. After all, who wants to input a 6-digit code every time they log in? To achieve a healthy balance, we recommend choosing a CIAM tool that supports passwordless authentication methods like biometrics or FIDO passkeys, and offers adaptive authentication. If you have to use OTPs, make sure you give the user enough time to do what they need to before their session token expires (e.g., allow them to stay signed in for a few hours).
2. It can be complex to integrate a CIAM tool with your application or service. We recommend choosing a solution that offers detailed, step-by-step guidance on how to integrate it and, where possible, utilizing the support of your CIAM provider to get the solution up and running.
3. CIAM solutions can be costly and require a lot of resources to run effectively. If budget and time are limited resources for your team, we recommend choosing a cloud-based CIAM solution. This will reduce up-front costs and eliminate the financial and time costs of infrastructure maintenance.

Best CIAM providers: Our team of software analysts and researchers have put together a shortlist of the best providers of CIAM solutions, as well as adjacent lists covering similar topics:

• The Top 9 Customer Identity And Access Management (CIAM) Solutions
• The Top 10 Identity Verification Software
• The Top 10 KYC (Know Your Customer) Solutions
• The Top 9 Age Verification Solutions
• The Top 10 User Provisioning and Governance Tools
• The Top 10 Anti-Money Laundering Software

Features checklist: When comparing CIAM solutions, Expert Insights recommends looking for the following features:

1. Streamlined customer registration and onboarding: To reduce drop-offs during registration, the solution should make it easy for users to sign up to your service. It should offer a modern, intuitive interface, allow users to sign up using existing credentials (either via social login support or single sign-on) and auto-fill profile fields based on these credentials, and it should use progressive profiling to collect data gradually during user interactions to reduce form abandonment. 
2. Self-service account management: End users should be able to manage their own accounts via a user-friendly interface. This should include the ability to manage their preferences, reset passwords, and update their profile details.
3. Multi-channel user authentication: End users should be able to authenticate on any device, and they should be able to choose from a range of authentication methods. We recommend looking for a solution that offers biometrics and passwordless authentication (e.g., FIDO passkeys), as these are highly secure and create minimal friction for the end user.
4. Single sign-on: If you offer multiple services or applications, end users should be able to sign into all of them with a single set of credentials.
5. Threat detection: The best CIAM solutions use behavioral analytics to identify risky logins and either block the login attempt and report it to you, or “step up” authentication for that user.
6. Reporting: The solution should log all user login activity. This can streamline compliance audits and help you detect unusual and potentially malicious logins. It can also give you an insight into your customers’ habits and needs, which in turn can help you personalize their experience and make data-driven decisions about the creation of new services.
7. Compliance: The solution should offer built-in templates to help you comply with data privacy standards relevant to your business. It should also enable end users to easily control data sharing preferences, opt in or out of marketing, and manage their consent.
8. Integrations: The CIAM tool should be compatible with any device and operating system, integrate seamlessly with your application or service, and offer integrations with other customer management platforms such as CMS, CRM, and CDP tools.
9. Scalability: The solution should be able to scale up or down easily in line with changes in demand for your service (e.g., an influx of customers when you add a new service or product, or a loss of customers when you remove a product).

Further reading: You can find all our articles on CIAM in our Identity And Access Management Hub.

Want to jump straight in? Here are a few articles we think you’ll enjoy: 

• Shortlist: The Top 9 Customer Identity And Access Management (CIAM) Solutions
• Interview: Jason Keenaghan On Protecting Consumer Privacy With Better Customer Identity And Access Management
• Interview: Keiron Dalton On How We Can Restore Trust In Our Digital Identities
• Interview: Joe Palmer On Looking Authentication In The Face
• Blog: The Four Pillars of Identity and Access Management (IAM) Explained