Explaining the blueprint for an adaptive CIAM Platforms (CIAM-Part 2)
CIAM enables seamless omnichannel digital customer experiences by providing each user with a unique digital identity. This identity allows customers to easily connect with brands across all digital touchpoints
This article discusses how adaptive customer-centric customer identity and access management (CIAM) capabilities are essential for digital transformation and integration with emerging digital ecosystems. By dynamically managing customer identities and access across channels, CIAM allows organizations to deliver seamless, personalized experiences across an expanding set of touchpoints. This helps build customer trust and loyalty while streamlining processes like onboarding, authentication, authorization, and identity governance. Well-implemented CIAM also improves security by strengthening access controls and reducing vulnerabilities from outdated or inactive credentials. As digital interactions proliferate, CIAM will remain a core pillar for enabling frictionless customer journeys and maximizing value in an increasingly distributed and connected business environment.
Explaining the blueprint for an adaptive CIAM
While CIAM focuses on providing seamless customer experiences across channels, many enterprises are still developing their customer experience capabilities, especially as customers increasingly engage through new digital channels. As the digital ecosystem continues expanding rapidly, it is important for companies to prioritize developing strong customer experience practices and technologies. This will help ensure customers have consistent, positive interactions regardless of how they choose to engage with the brand. Investing in customer experience capabilities can help companies better compete as customer expectations rise and the experience becomes a key brand differentiator.
Traditional identity management capabilities are well documented, so this blueprint focuses on customer experience-related capabilities and the relationship between experience and security. Most enterprises have underdeveloped these areas, hindering their ability to develop good omnichannel experiences suited for digital transformation. By outlining key customer experience capabilities and implementation considerations, we can have a deeper discussion on bridging customer relationships with responsible security practices.
The “C” in CIAM stands for customer, representing a key focus on customers, their journeys, and overall experiences. Providing a seamless customer experience is a primary driver for organizations to invest in CIAM platforms.
The “C” in CIAM stands for customer, representing a key focus on customers, their journeys, and overall experiences. Providing a seamless customer experience is a primary driver for organizations to invest in CIAM platforms. CIAM platforms aim to go beyond traditional identity and access management (IAM) by placing equal emphasis on security and the customer experience. Rather than just serving as a security tool, CIAM platforms are designed to enhance customers’ digital experiences throughout their lifecycle interactions with a brand from registration and authentication to account management and beyond. Traditional IAM perspectives alone are insufficient for CIAM — a customer-centric mindset is also needed to develop solutions that meet evolving customer demands and expectations in the digital world.
Another aspect concerning this blueprint is the growing use of single page applications (SPAs) in the enterprise has increased the need for secure yet seamless authentication and authorization flows. SPAs run entirely on the client-side, posing unique challenges for implementing security. OpenID Connect (OIDC) is an open standard that addresses this by enabling authentication for SPAs through an authorization server. However, organizations currently support many different security patterns, driving up development costs to handle numerous authentication and authorization methods across systems. This lack of standardization impacts both costs and the maintainability of business rules.
Another important aspect is data privacy and compliance. As applications and data move to the cloud and are accessed across different regions, it becomes critical to ensure consistent privacy and security standards are applied. A standardized OIDC-based approach could help streamline the management of privacy policies, consent workflows, and data access controls. This would make it easier for organizations to comply with regulations like GDPR which require protecting personal data no matter where it resides or is accessed from.
As applications move to the browser and mobile, a consistent OIDC-based approach could help streamline integration between user-facing and backend systems. This would reduce complexity while maintaining security as users access resources through various channels.
Key Fundamentals and Guiding Principles
Here are some key fundamentals and guiding principles that should be considered when architecting Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) platform (s):
- Types of Users & Journeys: CIAM solutions aim to provide a seamless experience for all types of users, not just customers. A poor experience for employees, agents, or partners can negatively impact the overall customer experience. The architectural patterns developed for customer-facing experiences are equally applicable to other user groups and channels.
While CIAM originated to support customer journeys, the same principles can be applied to employee journeys and partner journeys. The term “customer” should be thought of broadly as any party interacting with the brand.
CIAM platforms typically integrate with systems that manage different types of relationships and journeys, such as digital experience platforms (DXP), customer relationship management (CRM), partner relationship management (PRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and other solutions specific to an organization or industry. The exact integration may differ slightly depending on whether it is supporting a customer, employee, or partner experience and the associated systems and data models.
The goal is to provide a consistent, seamless experience for all users while leveraging existing relationship management investments (CRM, PRM, etc.) across the enterprise. - Adaptive CIAM: Adaptive CIAM solutions can enhance security and usability by incorporating adaptive authentication and authorization mechanisms. These solutions provide personalized access based on contextual information like the user’s location, device, and previous authentication methods. Considering contextual details for each access request allows for a more granular approach to security. E.g., a higher authentication assurance may be required on a new device compared to a trusted one. Location data could trigger additional verification if access is requested from an unfamiliar area.
By adapting authentication and authorization levels based on contextual clues, organizations can apply the optimal security controls for each situation, balancing protection with convenience for legitimate users. This type of adaptive and risk-based CIAM framework enhances both the user experience and overall security posture compared to a one-size-fits-all approach. - Omnichannel Experience: A consistent omnichannel experience is a key driver behind the evolution of customer identity and access management (CIAM). CIAM should not be viewed solely as a security tool, but rather as an enabler of differentiated customer experiences that support digital transformation. By providing a single customer identity and profile across channels, CIAM allows customers to interact with brands through their preferred channels and enables smooth hand-offs between channels. For example, a customer could add products to their shopping cart online and have that cart visible to a call center agent if they then choose to contact customer support via phone. CIAM facilitates this type of seamless omnichannel experience that keeps customers engaged and improves brand loyalty.
- Smart devices & Digital Ecosystem: As smart devices and the Internet of Things (IoT) continue to grow in popularity, customers expect a unified digital experience across all of their connected devices. Many brands now have customers interacting through mobile phones, applications, and smart appliances. However, managing identities and providing access across this growing digital ecosystem presents new challenges.
Customers do not want to repeatedly register or log in to different devices and services. At the same time, smart devices may reside outside an organization’s traditional security perimeter. A customer identity and access management (CIAM) solution can help address these challenges by providing secure, single sign-on access across a brand’s digital properties and partner ecosystems.
CIAM streamlines the user experience through out-of-the-box integrations with various smart devices and applications. Just as importantly, it protects customer privacy and data security as identities span an increasingly distributed environment. CIAM also enables brands to expand their offerings by integrating with third-party vendors and digital marketplaces. This allows organizations to leverage the broader ecosystem to extend their reach to new customers in a compliant manner.
Overall, CIAM is a key tool for organizations to deliver a unified customer experience across the growing digital and smart device landscape, while maintaining security and privacy as identities move beyond traditional boundaries. - Personalization: Personalization through a unique digital identity allows companies to better understand individual customers. By having a common view of a user’s interactions, interests, transaction history, privacy settings, and preferences, companies can gain valuable insights into what each customer wants. This contextual understanding enables personalized experiences tailored to each person’s individual needs and interests. With user’s consent, a digital identity can correlate all of a user’s engagements with a brand to deliver more relevant and customized experiences.
Overall, personalization through a unique digital identity stands to improve customer satisfaction by meeting people where they are and providing options that resonate on a personal level.. - Progressive Profiling: Progressive Profiling is an approach used by brands to gradually build customer profiles over time through ongoing interactions. In the early stages of engaging with a new customer, the brand adopts a less intrusive process by assigning a friendly user ID without extensive validation. This allows the customer to explore products and services anonymously to develop familiarity and trust with the brand.
As the relationship deepens through repeated use and sharing of optional personal details, the brand can enrich the customer profile with more accurate information to deliver personalized and contextualized experiences. The progressive nature respects the customer’s privacy needs upfront while strategically obtaining their consent to offer improved service and targeted communications that enhance loyalty to the brand in the long run. - Identity Proofing (Verification & Validation): Identity proofing, also known as identity verification and validation, is an important process for ensuring that an individual’s claimed digital identity accurately represents their real-world identity. As potential customers move from being prospects to purchasing products, organization implement progressively stronger identity proofing controls. This helps confirm that private customer data and access to accounts is only granted to the legitimate account owner.
Effective identity proofing balances security with usability and data privacy. Controls are scaled based on the sensitivity of the information or transactions involved, with more rigorous validation required for higher-risk activities.
The goal is to prevent fraud while still providing a positive customer experience, especially for low-risk interactions. Continuous risk assessments help organization continuously strengthen their identity proofing measures in response to the evolving threats. - Prevention & Control: It is important that strong preventative measures and controls are in place to monitor digital activity for potential fraud, data leaks, and cyber-attacks. Automated security systems should be actively scanning for threats and vulnerabilities to help protect against incoming cyber risks. Ensuring robust cybersecurity defenses and oversight can help safeguard users and their information.
My architectural guidance for build vs buy decisions remains the same as originally stated in digital blueprint. The preference is given to off-the-shelf application packages for commodity software and custom development for differentiating experiences. Due to the involvement of other platforms like CRM and PRM, there may be a need to write custom APIs to aggregate information between the IAM system and other platforms to support an overall user experience. For example, APIs could help with authorization or customer validation. Newer IAM platforms have introduced some incremental capabilities to bridge some integration gaps. However, they may not be able to support complex customer account models and service level agreements that are specific to our business needs.
Overall, the build vs buy decision focuses on using off-the-shelf solutions where possible for common functions. Custom development is preferred for experiences that differentiate our offerings. APIs may need to be created to integrate data across systems in a way that provides a unified user experience, especially for authorization and customer data validation given our complex models. The capabilities of newer IAM platforms are improving but may still have limitations for our specific requirements.
In addition, ensure that platforms support omnichannel experience, leverage cloud that supports portability, high availability & scalability. Build it modular, API-enabled services, event-driven design, reactive microservice architecture, etc.
Integrated view of Client Identity & Access Management (CIAM) Platform (s)
Let us integrate key Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) components into the Digital Platform Blueprint that is based on the on Digital Layered Architecture model previously published. By incorporating CIAM, the updated blueprint will provide functionality for managing user identities, authentication, authorization, and account/profile management across digital touchpoints. This will help strengthen security, privacy, and user experience across the platform.
Key architectural components of Client Identity & Access Management (CIAM) are the following:
While the CIAM vendor platform provides a strong foundation for identity and access management, some key capabilities required for the solution extend beyond its native features. Fully delivering the integrated solution will require building upon the CIAM foundation through strategic integrations with additional core platforms and third-party services. In above diagram, areas have been highlighted where partnerships can help augment the CIAM offering to more completely meet all capabilities needed. Overall, the CIAM platform establishes a solid base, but complementary integrations are highlighted as opportunities to deliver the full scope of the desired solution.
CIAM platforms help companies securely manage digital customer identities and access. Key components of CIAM platforms include:
- Authentication Management: It includes various methods and policies to verify the identity of users accessing digital applications and services. This helps ensure only authorized users can access sensitive systems and data. Authentication mechanisms supported include username/password, multi-factor authentication for stronger verification, adaptive authentication using risk-based rules, and biometrics. Single sign-on is also supported, allowing users to access multiple related systems without repeated logins. Users can sometimes authenticate using existing social media accounts for a simplified registration and login experience.
By centralizing digital identity management, CIAM platforms allow companies to consistently authenticate users across websites, mobile apps, APIs, and other digital touchpoints. This improves security by preventing unauthorized access while also enhancing usability with features like single sign-on. - Session & Token Management: It provides functions such as setting session timeouts and idle session time limits, as well as enabling logouts. Tokens are protected security tokens that are issued when users authenticate. Tokens can be stateful or stateless, with session management handling the state of stateful tokens. Token issuance is supported by various authentication flows, including the authorization code flow, implicit flow, and hybrid flow, which are commonly provided by OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect (OIDC) standards.
By implementing session and token management best practices, authentication systems can help prevent security issues like session hijacking, fixation, or replay attacks that could lead to unauthorized access. The mechanisms provide an important layer of access control and help protect user identities and authenticated sessions. - Identity Proofing Management: Identity Proofing Management is the process of verifying and validating the authenticity of user identities during the registration process. It allows organizations to verify key user information like email addresses, physical addresses, etc. to confirm that the person registering is who they claim to be.
It supports a progressive profiling approach which gradually collects user details through minor interactions over time, rather than requiring an extensive upfront registration. The process starts by collecting minimal necessary data from the user initially. It then prompts for additional optional information from the user as their relationship with the organization develops and their interest in making purchases is expressed. Identity proofing progressively validates and confirms the accuracy of the customer’s provided information at each step.
This approach provides a better user experience by not overburdening new users with lengthy registration forms. It also allows organizations to build trust and obtain more complete user profiles incrementally as engagement increases. The progressive identity validation helps ensure only legitimate users are able to access services and make purchases. - Policy Management: Policy Management provides a rules-based engine to define, enforce, and audit policies for user access, authentication, authorization, and single sign-on. It allows organizations to establish controls over password requirements, multi-factor authentication, session management, identity verification, privacy and consent, data protection, and compliance with regulations.
The rule engine supports defining business logic to govern user transactions and interactions with systems/features. For example, rules can dictate when users can access certain functions, make purchases, or perform specific actions. This helps enforce an organization’s business processes and manage online transactions according to set schedules and guidelines. Auditing capabilities provide oversight of policy adherence and potential issues.
Overall, policy management gives organization a centralized control and visibility over digital identity and access management. By standardizing protocols through a rule’s engine, it helps ensure appropriate usage of resources while meeting both internal and external compliance requirements. - User Profile Management: It manages user data and preferences. It allows users to create accounts through a registration workflow that collects key information like names, addresses, and contact details. The system also supports progressive user profiling to gradually collect individual profile data over time through their interactions. This progressively developed user profile data then enables segmentation and personalization features that can tailor the user experience and content. Overall, effective user profile management is important for building trusted relationships with customers and delivering personalized services.
- Privacy & Consent Management: It is crucial for building user trust and complying with data protection regulations. It allows users to clearly understand how their personal data will be collected and used. It gives users control over their privacy preferences, so they can choose what information is collected and shared. It allows the organization to obtain explicit, opt-in consent from users before collecting any sensitive personal data. It also makes it easy for users to review, update or revoke consent at any time. Maintaining transparency and putting users in control of their own data is key to establishing a strong privacy-first approach.
- Risk & Fraud Management: It help organizations detect, prevent, and mitigate fraudulent activities. These systems analyze user behavior and other contextual factors to continuously assess risk levels during authentication processes and user interactions. Through adaptive authentication techniques, IP blacklisting, and other controls, Risk & Fraud Management aims to proactively prevent fraud from occurring. By monitoring activities and blocking suspicious actions in real-time, these systems play an important role in protecting organizations and users from financial and data losses due to fraud.
- Audit & Monitoring: CIAM track all user authentication, authorization, and identity proofing activities in detailed logs and audit trails. This allows organizations to monitor for security risks, compliance issues, and performance problems. CIAM platforms generate alerts and notifications when any security policies are violated. Comprehensive reporting gives insights into user activities and helps ensure the identity system operates as intended. The audit and monitoring features are crucial for maintaining security, oversight, and regulatory compliance.
- Attack Detection & Exploit Detection: They are critical security controls. The goal is to detect threats and prevent exploits that could impact customer identity or access. This involves anomaly detection techniques to flag unauthorized access attempts, brute-force login trials, and other suspicious activities. It also aims to mitigate known software vulnerabilities and system weaknesses. By promptly identifying attacks and blocking exploitation of security issues, organizations can better protect users and their sensitive data.
The views expressed are my own and do not represent any organization. I aim to have respectful discussions that further positive change as we navigate unprecedented technological transformation. Change is constant, so my perspective may evolve over time through learning, testing, and adapting to new information.
