Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) has seen an exponential growth in the last 5 years when the first Ciam systems surfaced in 2014. Recent surveys suggest nearly 50% of organizations have implemented the Customer IAM solution to keep digital identities secure.

Being a subset of the larger concept of Identity Access Management (IAM), Consumer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) platform has a lot to offer when it comes to customer data security and management. With evolution of CIAM 2.0, you can expect more out of it.

If you heard about customer identity management platform lately and considering adopting it for your business, then this article is meant for you. Here, we have discussed a few important aspects of best CIAM platform.

Table of Contents

What is CIAM?

How CIAM is an Effective Solution?

Key Components of a Perfect CIAM Platform

• Adaptability
• Enhanced Security
• Extensibility
• Progressive Information Privacy & Security Compliance
• Easy Data Access Control
• Seamless API Integration
• Customer Journey Analytics
• Seamless Customer Experience
• Efficient Preference Management

What is CIAM?

Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) is an effective solution that helps you collect and manage client identity and profile information. It also helps you control & manage customer access to applications and administrations.

In the simplest form, access management solution allows clients to safely sign in to various applications with secure registration and login processes.

How CIAM is an Effective Solution?

Here, you can find meticulously designed systems like single sign-on (SSO), data tracking & reporting, multi-factor authentication (MFA), two-factor authentication (2FA), catalog administrations and data access governance, access management, and more with advanced CIAM platforms.

Using single customer identity management platform you can control and manage access to multiple applications. These smart solutions are designed to scale to handle the tens-of-millions of digital identities in a B2C environment.

It could also be used to identify unique customers and personalize user experience based on accumulated personal preferences.

Key Components of a Perfect CIAM Platform

Adaptability

The first component of a perfect customer IAM platform should be instant adaptability. During the customer interaction process, a CIAM program interacts with multiple client interaction scenarios at scale. Here, how client interacts with your applications and services and the user experience you manage to provide to the customer makes difference.

For example, in addition to fetching & storing user IDs, there are multiple other factors that are considered to determine perfect CIAM platform. These factors may include in which tier of service are they, their privacy preferences, color theme they choose, and more. A perfect identity management platform should offer seamless storage, retrieval, and modification of required information instantly.

Enhanced Security

Frictionless security is equally important component that determines enhanced user experience. With advanced customer identity and access management technology, you can expect seamless authentication and interaction between users, applications, systems, and things. When we talk about frictionless security, it is all about providing seamless user experience while keeping the security parameters intact.

To provide comprehensive security, CIAM platform may come integrated with multi-factor authentication, two-factor authentication, one-way hashing, risk-based authentication, field-level encryption, passwordless authentication, or anything else, it shouldn’t hamper the user experience.

Extensibility

Extensibility component is the next important aspect that enables you to offer seamless customer experience. For example, if the access management solution is integrated for knowledge-based authentication today, but tomorrow you need to integrate multi-factor authentication for funds transfer, then your customer identity management platform should be flexible enough to integrate with this new demand.

In addition to that, it should also offer scalability to meet possible new demand. Though best CIAM platforms are designed to handle tens-of-millions of digital identities, still, it becomes important to offer rapid service too when needed.

Progressive Information Privacy & Security Compliance

Adhering to information privacy policies is another important aspect reputed CIAM providers consider. Here, they not only try to abide by the law of land but they also ensure the information privacy remains intact no matter data is stored, accessed, or managed anywhere in the world on their platform.

It becomes important as the cost of not meeting the legal requirements of information privacy could be really higher to bear for an organization. Thus, it is best practice to abide by information privacy policies to offer seamless user experience while earning user trust as well. Furthermore, meeting security compliance requirements on global level is another important aspect best CIAM providers follow.

Easy Data Access Control

Effective data governance policy is another key component to perfect CIAM platform. While it is essential for an organization to keep customer data secured, it is equally important to ensure easy access to this data by concerned departments.

Here, organization should integrate frictionless data access control strategy to save time and offer seamless experience. An effective customer IAM solution ensures smooth access to data by related parties by developing and applying flexible schemas.

Seamless API Integration

The established fact is that technologies work smoother when they seamlessly integrate with other systems and technology providers. Here, a perfect CIAM platform should be integrating seamlessly with analytics system, CRM, content management, marketing automation, business intelligence, and other platforms & services.

Customer Journey Analytics

Best CIAM vendors offer in-depth information about customer journey on their platform. Here, user can see information like customer insight, client interaction, customer journey analytics like preferences, browsing history, market intelligence, and more. The best customer identity platform offers you a deeper insight into client data.

Seamless Customer Experience

Seamless customer experience is one important component of a perfect CIAM platform that distinguishes it from others. Here, seamless customer experience works like a key to user engagement. With better adaptability, progressive security & privacy policies, easy data access & integration, extensibility & scalability, cloud-based services, and other features, best CIAM providers offer seamless customer experience.

Efficient Preference Management

For seamless user experience, the best CIAM platform should organize data in such a way that it is distributed across digital channels effortlessly. For example, single sign-on could be useful option when user wants to create single account to access multiple web-based applications.

TL;DR

Customer identity and access management (CIAM) platform offers the easiest and safest solution to help protect digital identities. It is designed to protect the tens-of-millions of identities in a B2C environment effortlessly. It offers tons of useful features to keep your identities secure with strong encryption.

Here, the best CIAM platform should be enabled to provide you capabilities to solve three major aspects of client interaction with your business that includes access, recognition, and protection.

In key components of a perfect customer IAM platform include adaptability, security, scalability, privacy & security compliance, easy data access control, seamless API integration, customer journey analytics, efficient preference management, seamless customer experience, and more. Furthermore, defining business objectives is an important component while deciding the perfect customer IAM platform.

While selecting the best identity solution provider you should be looking for few important facts including experience & references, proven implementation with scalability, end-to-end security, standards-based solution, financial viability & market stability, the scope of services, and more.