1 Introduction
Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) systems have become indispensable components of organizations' digital services and engagement solutions. As businesses maximize their use of digital platforms, the need for robust, secure, and user-friendly customer and consumer identity management solutions has grown exponentially. CIAM systems address this need by offering several core functionalities.
CIAM systems provide registration and onboarding options in order to make it easier for customers to sign up, often leveraging progressive profiling techniques. Onboarding flows need to be able to be tailored for each deploying organization’s specific use cases. CIAM solutions also allow users to associate devices and other digital identities with primary accounts, authenticate, authorize, collect, and store information about consumers from across many domains. Unlike workforce IAM systems, information about consumer or customer users often arrives from many unauthoritative sources. Information collected about consumers can be used for many different purposes, such as authorization to resources or for transactions, or for analysis to support marketing campaigns, or Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) regulatory compliance. In these cases, organizations require identity verification, and customizable orchestration features within CIAM systems can enable this.
Old-style authentication methods such as passwords are insecure and not user-friendly. CIAM systems today must support advanced authentication mechanisms, including multi-factor authentication (MFA), contextual analysis, physical biometric verification, and behavioral biometric analysis. These methods not only enhance security by removing guessable or phishable passwords, but also improve the user experience by offering convenient and user-friendly ways to log in.
CIAM solutions enable organizations to gather and manage consumer and customer information more effectively. This data can be used for personalization and targeted marketing efforts, often with a goal of increasing revenue. CIAM platforms should be able to integrate seamlessly with a variety data sources, providing a unified view of customer identities. This integration allows businesses to collect valuable insights into customer behavior, preferences, and interactions. With this information, organizations can create highly personalized experiences and targeted marketing campaigns, which significantly improve customer engagement and satisfaction. Personalized experiences also lead to higher conversion rates and increased customer loyalty, thereby driving business growth.
CIAM systems can help organizations comply with privacy regulatory requirements worldwide. As data privacy regulations become more widely enacted, organizations must ensure they handle customer data responsibly in accordance with regulations such as the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). CIAM systems are designed to support compliance with these regulations by providing features such as customer self-service portals that allow viewing and editing of pertinent data, consent management, data access controls, data export and deletion, and audit trails. These features ensure that organizations can demonstrate compliance with data protection laws, avoiding significant fines and reputational damage associated with non-compliance.
Recent KuppingerCole research indicates that CIAM solutions are evolving to encompass more use cases. Business-to-business customer IAM (B2B CIAM) is a growing sub-segment of the CIAM market, characterized by the need to do more rigorous background checks on contractors, customers and partners; hierarchical delegated administration; identity federation; attribute-based access controls (ABAC); compliance checks and sanctions screening; compromised credential detection; dedicated per-customer management portals; time-limited accounts; and more. In addition to B2B CIAM functions, identity governance and lifecycle management features are sought after by organizations that need to harden their security postures.
Furthermore, organizations in the ecommerce, retail, media, and similar industries find that out-of-the-box integrations with payments services, Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), and Fraud Reduction Intelligence Platforms (FRIPs) are increasingly necessary. Losses from fraud are increasing year over year, and fraudsters innovate and change tactics rapidly; thus fraud prevention must start in the CIAM platform.
