Six Customer Identity and Access Management Fundamentals for Enterprise

Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) is a strategic need for businesses to deliver a seamless, personalized omnichannel brand experience and revenue to consumers.

However, not all customer identity and access management solutions are similar organizations must evaluate their identity management strategies to be successful. The CIAM solution focuses on external users, those who generate revenue for your company.

The primary focus is on managing customer identity, but CIAM solutions are as effective as other types of external stakeholders;

Here are 6 basic features that each successful enterprise-class customer identity management solution must have.

1. Identify and Engage Customers across multiple channels

Modern, cloud-based CIAM software provides a flexible and scalable way to customize any business case with best practice registration and sign-in screens, transforming unknown online visitors into known, loyal customers.

These vendors also support a variety of authentication methods, including single sign-on (SSO), traditional username and password flow, social sign-on capabilities — via SAML federation, OAuth and OpenID connectivity (social) and biometrics, two-factor authentication, and more.

These features help enterprises create friction-free and safe “front doors” for customers across channels and devices.

In addition, the best CIAM solutions provide out-of-the-box social interaction and loyalty capabilities that help organizations deliver real-time value when analyzing customers to encourage engagement and inspire audience insight.

2. Securely build and manage online profiles

CIAM solutions help organizations manage customer data on a centralized, secure, compliant platform designed for today’s global B2C enterprises.

The advanced profile management database makes it easy to capture, aggregate, query, and segment large amounts and categories of structured and unstructured data from multiple sources.

In addition, comprehensive customer preference management helps organizations build trust with customers when managing their identities, enabling them to maintain full visibility and control over the data they collect from customers and how they are used.

The best CIAM vendors allow enterprises to use intuitive UI builders, scalable markup languages, or custom opt-in, preferences, and data control flows through direct API access.

From day one, one of their main goals is to reduce the number of identities that users have, or to allow single sign-on between services (and to hide facts that may involve multiple identities).

Consider online applications that your external users use.

• How many applications do you have?
• Does your organization serves both consumers and corporate customers or partners?
• Did the external contractor/consultant access your online application?
• Do you provide a collaborative space?

One of the main benefits of the goals of the CIAM solution, as well as customer identity and access management, is the ability of external users to access a variety of online applications using a single identity, regardless of which business unit they belong to or who they are designed to.

3. Endless availability

As with scalability, high availability is critical to use cases where revenue is affected by downtime.

Your company may not need on a single site or application to provide that much availability, Although for enterprises with multiple brands and digital properties, has higher uptime than downstream components.

LoginRadius has multiple available regions around the world to support the global consumer brand’s customer registration experience.

4. Ensuring improved data security

Unfortunately, we can’t even go for months without hearing a login violation. As more and more companies implement online or app status, and more consumers sign up for these accounts, the risk of compromise will only increase year by year. Data security is critical, but expensive.

For large enterprises, to effectively defend against cyberattacks and security threats, CIAM systems require top-level protection availability and data reliability, distributed backup, and disaster recovery capabilities for network and identity-based threats through scoped data access, full database encryption of data at rest, and leading services.

From encryption to password breach detection, your login signed in will be as secure as possible when you outsource identity management. You can’t spend every second every day making sure your login is the safest, but that’s exactly what CIAM does.

That way, you can know at night that your and your customers’ data is secure and reliable.

5. GDPR Compliance

Global brands are subject to regional data protection regulations in the wake of high-profile breaches of consumer privacy, and it is critical to have an identity management system that essentially complies with these strict regulations. Compliance identity management systems provide customer preference centers and consent storage to simplify cross-channel compliance while continuing to deliver a seamless customer experience.

Under regulations such as the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Data Privacy Act (CCPA) recently passed by California, companies must responsibly collect and store customer data or risk significant fines or penalties.

6. Securely build and manage online profiles

One of the fundamental functional requirements and the benefits of customer identity and access management solutions is the support for a variety of (external and internal) authentication technologies and protocols. Your customer already has working authentication credentials.

When a CIAM solution supports 3rd party authentication methods, your consumer can bring their own digital identity. Consumers like to do this because it allows for faster registration (conversion) and ease of use (return to the customer).

The result? Increase revenue.

Business customers will be happy when they can log on to your services from their corporate network solely.

Conclusion

Customer identity management is more than just a simple login. It can deliver real value to your business, from the quality of life of your employees to income generation, and it has the potential to be an integral part of your success.

The combination of these seven advantages demonstrates the importance of centralized identity and access management for modern enterprises.