Customer Identity & Access Management (CIAM)
What is CIAM?
CIAM stands for Customer Identity and Access Management, the capability to manage customer user accounts and access rights. With CIAM, your organization can ensure that customers have secure access to a customer portal and to other applications and data intended for them.
What Is the Difference Between CIAM and IAM?
Both CIAM and IAM manage user accounts and access rights to an organization's IT systems. The difference lies in the audience. IAM systems are designed for your own employees, the internal users of the systems. CIAM focuses on external users; customers, of course, but also partners your organization works with. It typically involves only a few IT systems and only the data for that specific customer or partner. For consumer use cases, it often involves a larger number of accounts.
Why Is CIAM Important?
CIAM is important because customer and partner access management often requires different considerations. Digital access for employees must also be secure and user-friendly, but a customer-centric perspective requires even more scrutiny. Customers interact with your systems only occasionally, so access must be completely intuitive and frictionless when they do. Privacy also requires extra attention. Employees should never receive unnecessary access to customer data, and customers must never gain access to each other's data.
And you must be able to scale your CIAM capabilities without issues; for employees, this can involve hundreds to thousands of users, while for consumers, it can be a portal with millions of users.
CIAM Examples
How does CIAM work in practice? Here are some examples:
With a CIAM platform, financial institutions such as banks can provide their customers with direct access to a personalized portal with all account information, transactions, loans, and more.
In schools, teachers and staff need access to class schedules and academic results. However, you also want students and their parents to access their personal information, and the exact access rights and capabilities may depend on grade level and age.
In our own HelloID platform, a cloud-based IAM environment, every customer has their own account in the service desk system. There, the customer can manage their configuration and view logs and reports.
Looking at these examples also shows the difference from standard IAM functions. In a modern IAM platform like HelloID, there is typically an automatic integration with the HR platform. Access rights are derived immediately from the role and other attributes stored in the HR system. If someone changes roles in the organization, this is updated in the HR system, and the IAM solution then adjusts the corresponding access rights. Employees or their managers can also request additional access rights for a temporary project, for example.
With CIAM, this works differently. Customers, students, and partners are normally not registered in the HR system. For provisioning these accounts, we must source data from other systems. In education, this is the student information system; at a bank, it's a customer system; and in B2B scenarios, the CRM system often serves as the source.
Beyond using different source systems, additional validation layers may be required. Account managers enter customer data in the CRM system themselves, which can easily introduce errors or duplicates. We cover this further in the last paragraph.
Additional CIAM Benefits
We already mentioned the CIAM capabilities needed to ensure customer access management is secure and user-friendly. At the same time, a CIAM solution can also provide additional insight into customer behavior. You can log all access attempts and, by analyzing that data, learn more about customer satisfaction and work to improve customer loyalty.
What Should You Look for When Choosing a CIAM Solution?
You can implement a dedicated CIAM platform to manage customer accounts and access. This is often a logical choice for large consumer volumes. For smaller numbers, a modern IAM platform can also suffice if it is prepared for the required CIAM functionality. This allows you to use one solution and work toward a 'holistic identity management' approach.
HelloID is one such example. Within a B2B organization, you can manage accounts for the customer portal in addition to your own employees. For regular employees, HelloID typically uses the HR system as the source. Since contract data and role changes are maintained accurately there, it forms the ideal backbone for your identity lifecycle. Managing customer accounts usually requires more attention. When you create a new customer relationship in the CRM, a connection with HelloID allows you to create customer accounts automatically. At the same time, a CRM system does not set an end date by default. Account managers are also usually less focused on keeping customer information continuously up to date. It then helps if you can automate routine checks or cleanup actions as well. For this, the HelloID service automation module is ideally suited.
We also often introduce a blended IAM and CIAM solution for educational institutions. Education systems usually record student start and end dates accurately. As a result, we can automatically manage all student accounts with HelloID, in addition to employee accounts. You can further secure access with MFA (Multifactor Authentication) to protect sensitive personal data.
Moreover, in higher education, people often fulfill a mix of roles. A senior student may also work as an employee mentorin Ig first-year students, and academic instructors often enroll in certain courses as students. Therefore, it is especially useful to avoid separate IAM and CIAM platforms and to use an integrated (C)IAM solution with HelloID.