What is Customer IAM (CIAM)?
Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) over the time has become a bit of an overloaded term. There are multiple articles, blogs, analyst reports explaining what CIAM is and defining it in different ways. The objective of this blog is to provide my perspective of CIAM in one-line definition.
Before defining what it is, let’s be clear on why we need to worry about CIAM.
Why CIAM?
Transforming the customer experience is at the heart of digital transformation. Digital technologies are changing the game of customer interactions, with new rules and possibilities that were unimaginable only a few years back. CIAM is a whole emerging area in the IAM, which is essentially an ingredient for digital customer experience.
The rest of the blog is based on the above statement. I believe that’s fair enough, and haven’t seen that been questioned much. We can safely assume that’s a well-accepted definition of the objective of CIAM. It might not be in the same words, but still, many who talk about CIAM, share a similar/closer view.
Gartner Definition
In one of it’s reports Gartner defines CIAM in a lighter way as,
In my view it’s not strong enough and does not carry enough depth to reach the objective of CIAM. CIAM is more than managing customer identities in a traditional way. It needs to be the facilitator to leverage identity data to catalyze business growth.
More CIAM Definitions
If you Google, you can find more definitions of CIAM. Not that all of them are wrong, but none of them IMO put enough weight on the objective of CIAM. Here I list few of them. Then again, these are different view points, and none of them are wrong or bad.
Customer-focused IAM
Rather calling CIAM, managing customer identities, I would like to call it customer-focused IAM. IAM is a well-defined term. As per Gartner,
The customer-focused IAM adds a lot of depth into the definition of IAM. For example, unlike traditional IAM, when you focus on customers, you probably start working with millions of impatient users, who get annoyed by filling lengthy forms, and cannot wait at least 2 seconds to log into a system. Even a small glitch in your system, they will take it to the social media and will make a big buzz. The slightest of leaked customer information could take a big slice of your share price down.
Yahoo!, for example, was in the middle of a series of data breaches a few years back, that exposed the PII data of more than 1 billion users. That did cost the company $350 million. They had to lower the sales price of its email and other digital services, which they sold to Verizon from $4.83 billion to $4.48 billion to account for the potential backlash from the data breaches.
Beyond Customer-focused IAM
Calling CIAM, the customer-focused IAM, still does not add enough weight on the emphasis that it should catalyze business growth. Unlike traditional IAM, a CIAM system should have the capability to integrate with customer relationship management (CRM) systems, marketing platforms, e-commerce platforms, content management systems (CMS), data management platforms and many more. A customer-focused IAM system, with no business integrations adds little value in terms of the business growth that we expect from having a CIAM solution.
What CIAM is?
Customer-focused IAM does not necessarily mean you only manage customer identities. That’s why I preferred customer-focused IAM instead of managing customer identities. In a typical CIAM solution in addition to direct customers, you also need to manage identities of employees who have direct access to the CIAM solution, or should integrate with an IAM system that manages employee identities. The latter is the preferred option. Also, not all the CIAM solutions are just B2C (business-to-consumer), it can also be B2B (business-to-business) or B2B2C (business-to-business-consumer) as well.
