The world has become a vast and complicated place. We’ve never been more interconnected, which is incredibly exciting but also comes with its share of confusion. Every country has its own rules, laws, and regulations about how data is transferred and exchanged. Many different industries do, as well. To further complicate matters, customers expect digital tools and solutions to be easy to use and understand. Customer identity and access management (CIAM) is increasingly necessary in this complex, contradictory climate.

There are countless avenues for a customer to access a digital business, and most organizations need some way to keep track of these behaviors. This is where CIAM comes in. To help you learn more about this powerful, versatile new tool and how to make use of it, we’ve put together this guide to CIAM.

What Is Customer Identity and Access Management?

Customer identity and access management is a technique that allows organizations to register, monitor, and manage customer identity. New users require a smooth, frictionless sign-up and onboarding experience, for instance, while remaining secure enough to guarantee data privacy. This allows developers to create targeted workflows for specific audiences.

CIAM best practices ensure that every transaction is secure while still being efficient and easy to use. Finally, CIAM specifies how you manage user data in general. CIAM solutions, therefore, allow developers to meet compliance mandates across various industry regulatory standards and frameworks.

Some common features provided by CIAM solutions include:

• Registration
• Tracking customers
• Single sign-on (SSO)
• Authentication
• Multi-factor authorization (MFA)
• Passkeys and passwordless authentication
• Identity verification
• Relationship management
• Decentralized identity
• Identity orchestration

CIAM also allows organizations to personalize their assets for different points of contact, as it keeps track of users and monitors where they’re accessing your resources. Someone accessing a resource via a smart TV will have far different needs than someone using a desktop, for example.

How To Implement CIAM in APIs

Traditionally, access to APIs is determined by who’s making the request. This means that API authorization is needed alongside user authentication workflows. CIAM solutions use a variety of signals to establish identity attributes, which are then used to grant access. This allows admins to follow the latest best practices for decentralized identity and API security.

Imagine a mobile user opening an app to keep track of streaming movies for the first time. They use a single-sign-on workflow to create a demo account, creating a user record in the CIAM solution. The user might look up a movie, which is then forwarded to an API like the Streaming Availability API, which is then authenticated using a token-based flow like OAuth. This method is convenient for the end user while guaranteeing that your organization won’t go bankrupt racking up API calls.

Now, imagine that you wanted to use the same resources to create a movie recommendation service. You could use the same API workflow but a different authentication flow. In this scenario, you might customize your CIAM solution to allow access to a user database and to send emails. These are just a few of the nearly endless applications for CIAM solutions.

What Are Next-Gen CIAM Solutions?

Identity management becomes exponentially more complicated when the public gets involved. Large organizations can potentially have millions of user IDs and transactions to track. Each transaction must be secure to prevent data breaches and unauthorized access. One organization might need to comply with numerous different compliance regulations as well. For example, financial transactions need to follow specific protocols, while medical records require another. Next-gen CIAM solutions emerged as a response to this increasingly complex environment.

Who’s Using CIAM?

As mentioned above, numerous industries require different CIAM needs. This can get tricky in cases like finance, which might require sending financial data to different countries, each with its own financial regulations. Healthcare is another area where CIAM is becoming more mandatory due to regulatory standards like HIPAA.

The healthcare industry is a particularly good example of why CIAM is so important. Medical records contain a staggering array of sensitive information, from the patient’s social security number (in the United States) to their address and vehicle registration number. It can even contain biometric information like fingerprints or voiceprints. Of course, not everyone who accesses a medical service needs access to all of this user data.

In this scenario, a CIAM solution might create an authorization workflow that allows patients to access their medical data using a PIN or password. Their doctor or other qualified medical professionals might also be able to access their complete records. A pharmacist filling a prescription doesn’t need all of that data, though. You might create a secondary flow for pharmacists that only returns data about their prescriptions. Even better still, the CIAM solution can configure transactions behind the scenes without additional effort from developers or customer service agents.

CIAM is becoming increasingly complex in today’s interconnected and decentralized world, as service providers might not be able to access central authorities like government bodies for verification. In this case, CIAM can replace official channels by creating custom workflows to access the proper verification channels.

Final Thoughts on CIAM

The world is only going to keep getting more complex from this point forward. Workplaces will likely become more decentralized, and both users and customers will become more international and diverse. Data regulations will become more robust and intense while data breaches remain rampant. Customer expectations are only going to continue to rise, as well, when so much competition is just a single click or swipe away. CIAM solutions prepare you and your organization for this inevitability, balancing efficiency with the scalability and security necessary in today’s digital marketplace.