Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM)

Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) is the management of customer identities and their access to digital services. The focus is on functions such as registration, login, profile management and consent management.

Unlike internal identity management, CIAM must scale to millions of users, offer frictionless login experiences (for example via social login or passwordless methods) and at the same time technically map data protection requirements such as consents and rights of access. Security mechanisms such as multi-factor authentication, anomaly detection and bot defense protect customer accounts against takeover without unnecessarily slowing down conversion.

CIAM is thus the customer-facing form of Identity and Access Management: while classic workforce IAM is aimed at employees and internal systems, CIAM addresses external users whose expectations of convenience are significantly higher and whose basis of trust is significantly narrower. For digital business models, CIAM is at the same time a building block of Identity Security, because customer accounts are a preferred target of attack.