Identity and access management (IAM) is a well-known cybersecurity category – one which centers around the need to manage user identities as they access and navigate certain applications and data. Organizations that do not take steps to ensure identity and access management is being properly coordinated run the risk of leaving themselves vulnerable to breaches and cyber-attacks.
Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) is an identity control solution specifically designed to allow organizations to manage the authentication of external users (i.e., customers). CIAM differs from IAM in that it prioritizes ease of use, with the goal of being as user friendly for customers as possible, while securing identities. Conventional IAM works well to manage and authenticate access of users within the domains of an organization’s employees, but its functionality is not as well suited to the fluctuating and demanding user base that is customers.
Simply put, while the technologies behind IAM and CIAM seem similar, there are key differences. IAM is designed to manage employees, while CIAM solutions work to manage customers.
What Is CIAM?
CIAM is a type of identity technology designed to allow organizations to manage the identities of their customers, without the complexity or functions that employees might need. The main purpose of a CIAM solution is to support organizations in their efforts to provide customers with a great experience and to protect their data, as well as managing customer access to applications and services.
CIAM is very important for maintaining the necessary trust between a brand and their customer base. Customers have two fundamental expectations for companies, which are:
- A positive user experience. Providing a great experience for customers means doing as much as possible to take them from a prospective buyer to a loyal brand advocate. Ensuring their experience is as personalized as possible, without moving into the realm of being overly intrusive, is a big part of that. If a customer’s falls short in any way, there is a chance that they will go elsewhere. With loss of custom at stake, an effective CIAM solution is worth investing in.
- Protection against privacy violations, breaches, and fraud. Customers are deeply concerned with the safety of their important data – especially Personally Identifiable Information (PII). One of the consequences of falling victim to a cyber-attack is the loss of your customers trust and loyalty. Understandably, people do not like to find that their data has been lost, stolen, or misused, and will be frustrated that the company’s actions have opened them up to that risk. In the IBM Cost of a Data Breach study, lost business was found to account for a financial loss of USD 1.42 million in 2022, so scaring customers away by losing control of their data has significant and clear repercussions for businesses.
By securely capturing and managing customer identity, as well as controlling customer access to applications and services, organizations solidify their security, and significantly reduce their risk of losing control of the data they have been entrusted with. This better protects their valued customers and their reputation.
Important Features Of A CIAM Solution
Any customer identity and access initiative must be supported by a solid security framework. It should enable this frictionless security, while making sure there is seamless interaction between users, systems, and devices, for an optimal customer experience.
Some essential features that make up a robust CIAM framework include:
Scalability
A growing customer base is what every business strives for and keeping up with that growth is vital to maintaining it. While you want as many customers as possible using your CIAM solution, the numbers can be difficult to predict (unlike an IAM solution, whose user base does not fluctuate nearly as much).
Your CIAM solution will have to deal with peaks and dips as your business grows with the introduction of new services or changes in demand for your service. It is essential that your CIAM solution has the capacity to scale according to changing customer needs, and to be able to handle users across various web and mobile channels, while ensuring performance and user experience across these channels does not suffer.
Flexibility
IAM systems are not known for being very flexible. Any changes – influenced by modern IT trends – tend to come onstream slowly, where the philosophy of making incremental adjustments over time rules. For CIAM systems, making changes needs to be quick and straightforward, with configuration requirements that are simple and easy to implement. Otherwise, customers will be annoyed that their OS has changed, and be resistant to upgrade again.
CIAM solutions cater to organizations’ need to keep on top of emerging customers trends, fluctuating numbers of customers, and changing industry standards. They need to remain relevant to the newest technological environments, so flexibility is vital.
Integration
You will want your CIAM solution to integrate effectively and seamlessly with as many channels as possible. This means that however a customer engages with you, they will have the same experience. An effective CIAM solution helps to create a unified customer profile which applications can use to provide users with a consistent, multi-channel experience that is tailored to each customers unique behaviors. The customer data used to achieve this tailored approach is critical to the business, so any CIAM solution must allow for integration with other types of solutions like CMS, CRM, CDP, etc.
Privacy And Security
CIAM solutions should provide data encryption, alert users of risky actions, and keep a record of user and administrator activity; this is in addition to managing the security levels of authentication mechanisms. For privacy, there are a range of regulations – including CCPA and GDPR – that organizations may be required to comply with. A CIAM solutions enables each user to review and accept the privacy policy of the organization and decide whether the privacy options offered are acceptable. By doing this, organizations can collect and use data in accordance with individual preference across applications, ensuring they fulfill any regulatory requirements and maintaining user trust.
Adaptive Authentication
Consumers have come to expect ease of access and convenience from any service, so ensuring your authentication solution offers both of those things is very important. Current authentication methods include Single Sign-On (SSO) through shared entities (like Google or Facebook), passwordless authentication, or multi-factor authentication (MFA) utilizing one-time passcodes (OTP), biometric data, and smart cards.
As well as improving convenience, strong authentication may also be a requirement for certain operations or use of data, for security reasons. A CIAM solution should allow for an adaptive approach to authentication – user should be able to authenticate according to their own preferences and behaviors. Users should also be given enough information regarding their account security to better-inform fraud detection efforts.
Data Collection And Analysis
It is important for organizations to make tactical business decisions based on relevant data. The better informed you are about your customers’ habits and wants, the more accurately you can curate their personalized experience, and keep them invested in your service. The data collected by CIAM solutions supports this through facilitating easy analysis by grouping customers based on their behavior and attributes. You can identify what related services or products a customer might be interested in.
This also lets you keep track of the number of active customers and leads to both the creation of new services and marketing and sales campaigns that are supported by data. According to Microsoft, leveraging customer behavior data to generate insights lead to organizations outperforming their peers by 85% in sales growth.
Summary
Businesses live or die based on customer satisfaction, especially nowadays when markets are saturated with high quality competitors that your customers could just as easily go to in order to have their needs met. Even in situations where the product or services offered are niche or out-of-the-box enough not to have a lot of competitors, it is important to not become complacent – if customers feel let down by your business, you can lose them.
A solid, well-implemented CIAM solution works to support organizations in managing their customer bases, providing them with a positive user experience while maintaining security and data privacy well enough to establish brand trust and keep their market reputation strong.
For a list of recommended CIAM solutions, read our article: Top 7 Customer Identity And Access Management (CIAM) Solutions.
