Glossary / Fundamentals
Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM)
CIAM is the practice and technology for registering, authenticating, and managing the identities of external users such as customers, while capturing their consent and protecting their personal data.
Also: CIAM
Customer Identity and Access Management is the discipline of handling identity for the people outside an organization who use its products: customers, members, citizens, and other end users. It covers sign-up, login, profile and preference management, consent capture, and the security controls that protect those accounts.
CIAM differs from workforce identity in scale, ownership, and intent. The user count can reach millions, the user owns the relationship rather than an IT department, and the business goals include conversion and retention alongside security. Because CIAM systems hold consumer personal data, they sit directly under privacy law such as the GDPR and similar regimes.
A CIAM platform typically provides registration and login, single sign-on across a company’s properties, multi-factor and increasingly passwordless authentication, consent and preference management, and integration with marketing and fraud systems.
Sources
- NIST SP 800-63 Digital Identity Guidelines: https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/