The term CIAM – Customer Identity Access Management – refers to the identification and assignment of access authorizations to “external” users of an organization, such as customers, partners, or citizens, who wish to conduct procedures with authorities via the Internet.
What is the difference between Identity & Access Management and Customer Identity & Access Management?
To understand the differences between Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Customer Identity & Access Management (CIAM), one may start with the perspective “internal vs. external”. Identity and Access Management is primarily about solutions to improve internal security, increase productivity and meet compliance requirements for organizational data management for your employees (internal users).
Customer Identity & Access Management, on the other hand, ensures that customers and other “external users” can securely use parts of your company’s IT infrastructure and have a consistently positive customer experience at all touchpoints of your company.
However, the most important feature of a Customer Identity Access Management system is protecting your organization against possible threats from external access. Your organization’s ability to influence security practices and access methods outside your network is limited especially concerning external users. You can’t control public networks, and the security of external users end devices. Customer Identity Access Management solutions reduce the risk of attacks on user accounts due to missing or weak security practices on the external user.
Fields of application of a Customer Identity & Access Management solution
Customer Identity Access Management always makes sense when companies need to manage many external identities of customers and/or partners and grant them secure and trackable access to a part of its IT services.
Once an identity is well-known, it is of great benefit to the marketing department, making individually tailored offers. This opens up completely new possibilities for the financial sector. For example, with a CIAM system, banks can divide authentication into different levels and offer specific services for which log-in is no longer required. Other services are simply password-protected and only for a few areas – e.g., for online banking or online brokerage – the user has to undergo strong multi-factor authentication.
Using a CIAM solution, insurance companies can offer their customers access to Web portals, thus significantly simplifying and accelerating customer communication. Not only for outgoing documents such as invoices and letters but also incoming information such as damage reports, photos of the damage, etc.
Features of a Customer Identity & Access Management Solution
- Registration at a web-based self-service portal
- Registration and login via identity providers and/or social networks such as Facebook or Google
- Profile creation and management
- Identity Repository
- Password and authorization management
- Authentication and application login
- SDKs and APIs for mobile applications
- Reports and evaluations
Advantages of a Customer Identity & Access Management Solution
Modern customer identity and access management facilitates access to information, applications and systems, thus improving the customer experience, reducing costs and lowering security risks.
The advantage of such a solution is the high degree of automation of the user administration, which relieves the help desk. This allows users to perform many tasks themselves, such as requesting a new password. CIAM systems are therefore considered particularly user-friendly: the fact that users do not need to call in a third party, for example the help desk, if they want to perform certain tasks increases satisfaction by far. This is because users can easily perform the actions themselves.
CIAM facilitates the automated “onboarding” of customers, partners, suppliers and all users of your web application. CIAM manages users in a GDPR-compliant, secure and “support-relieving” manner, and speeds up the complete process. You no longer need to worry about IAM principles and requirements, you can focus on your customers and partners.
Customer Identity & Access Management increases customer loyalty and satisfaction
Customer Identity and Access Management is essential for all organizations whose systems and processes are also used by external users. In addition to providing security, this also creates trust among customers. CIAM protects both your organization and your external users. The safer and smoother all processes are for your external users, the more satisfied and secure they feel, and it’s precisely these users who return.
