What is CIAM? (original) (raw)

There are several key benefits a CIAM solution can provide for your organization.

Creating an account must be frictionless for a user, they should be able to easily sign-up and sign-in to their account. Chances are they didn’t visit your site or application to only create an account, so you want the process of sign-up to be a smooth experience. This also becomes an opportunity to take advantage of social identity providers and allowing users sign-up with something they're already using, such as Apple, Facebook, Google, or Amazon.

It’s great if your customer already has an account, but now it’s important there’s a seamless process to get them signed back into your web app or service. In today’s digital era, your customer may have come to expect passwordless sign-in experiences as well.

Branded Interactions

Between a customer signing-up, signing-in, or getting email communications- these should all be interactions where a customer instantly recognizes your brand. A CIAM solution can ensure these types of interactions apply branding where and when it’s needed as you interact with your customers. A CIAM solution should provide a built-in and customizable UI for user sign-up and sign-in. You should be able to use Android, iOS, and JavaScript SDKs to add user sign-up and sign-in pages to your apps.

Understanding your customer

Gathering and understanding usage patterns, favorite products, personal preferences, various types of engagement- these are just a few mechanisms that can be used to better understand your customer. These various data points can all turn into business intelligence to provide better products and services for your customers.

Single sign-on across different apps

If your organization has several products and services with their own interfaces, it’s important customers are able to use their single account to sign-in to all of your services.

Self-service account recovery

Forgetting a password happens, but being able to quickly, and securely, recover an account should be simple. A customer should be able to quickly recover their account by using a verified identifier without the help of customer support. This could be the difference between making a business transaction or losing a potential customer.

Access controls with applications and web services

A CIAM solution should help with the last mile of integration with your customer-facing applications. Application load balancers, API gateways, and credential brokering to web services are all important when building enforcement points that proves access.

Security and privacy built-in

Security and privacy are expected from customers and finding the right balance between security and seamless access can be challenging. This is where a CIAM solution can help an organization find that right balance and adjust as needed. This underlying strategic direction can provide a delightful experience without compromising on the risk of losing customer trust. You should be able to protect your user’s accounts and enhance their sign-in experience with adaptive authentication, where a risk profile is taken into account as the user accesses the application. Other advanced security features, such as advanced bot detection, help your organization by protecting it from paying for automated accounts.

Extensibility

A CIAM solution should provide a robust set of API hooks and extensions to fully customize the registration, authentication, and customer journey. Identity verification, account verfication, and login processes should be customizable using workflows and integrate with Software Development Kits (SDKs), such as Java, C++, PHP, Python, Golang, Ruby, .NET, and JavaScript.

Compliance

A CIAM solution should align with multiple security and regulatory requirements, such as HIPAA, PCI DSS, SOC, ISO/IEC 27001, ISO/IEC 27017, ISO/IEC 27018, and ISO 9001.