What Are the Main Differences Between Employee/partner IAM Vs. Customer IAM?

A lot of people still try to perceive the concepts of IAM and CIAM. The level of awareness about identity management is not so high and very often it’s difficult to understand the difference between IAM( Enterprise+Partner)(identity and access management) and CIAM (customer identity and access management). Businesses should realize that managing IAM for customers is completely different from doing it for employees. Customer IAM requires the ability for much greater scalability, usability, convenience, security and privacy.

Usually, IAM provides businesses and partners the ability to enable the right people to access the right resources at the right times for the right reasons. IAM?solutions?also possess some similar CIAM features such as user management, secure authentication, and granting authorization to protected resources. The goal of identity management is to improve productivity and security while lowering costs associated with managing users and their identities, attributes, and credentials. All that functions do not quite capture the goals of CIAM.

CIAM, as the centerpiece for the Digital Transformation movement, focuses on end-users, i.e on the specific needs of customers who are accessing the resources of your business. It also includes reducing security threats and overhead for the administration of compliance, but in addition, it takes into account the unique needs of external customers. Security, compliance, and reduction of overhead are just the prerequisites to get to the best possible customer experience.

Redefining Customer Relationship Management

After we noted the short descriptions of IAM and CIAM, it’s time to count some factors which differentiate them:

The first difference?between IAM and CIAM is that enterprise identity management solutions could manage lesser identities with respect to CIAM. For instance, IAM can only manage some thousand identities, but CIAM could reach up to billions.

The second difference?refers to the choice that customers have in their participation in the identity process. In IAM, an employee uses the IAM tools to get access to the internal functionality he needs for doing his job. He is provisioned by the employer and follows the procedure, required for authentication. On the other hand, customers have more flexibility – they could choose between signing?up for your website, purchasing from you online, or subscribing to your digital services.?So, CIAM promotes user experience on the basis of personalized data received as inputs through customers

Actually, in the CIAM process the users have control of their identity. They decide whether to provide you with their information, unlike an employer who has your information already. A good CIAM solution should provide a way to request information in exchange for value so that the customer to provide their data to your website.

A third important difference?between IAM and CIAM is the need for customer-focused solutions to be able to scale dramatically and to handle burst traffic during events. According to Gartner, a CIAM solution is a mainstream business requirement - one that requires greater scalability and different functionality than traditional IAM. For example, IAM vendors may support tens to hundreds of thousands of employees and partners, but that doesn’t compare to the millions of users that may sign into a customer facing website on a given day.

The fourth difference?is that Company IAM is designed for internal organizational activities and does not support cross-channel interaction or cross device implementation. That means that customers cannot interact with your business through multiple channels (social media) or using different types of devices. One of the USPs of?customer identity management solutions is supporting cross-device and cross-channel interaction.

The fifth difference?is that CIAM ensures self-management services like password recovery and other account-related options which are the best examples of the customer-centric approach of CIAM. In this way, it entirely supports a customer-centric environment which is beneficial to business. Unfortunately, IAM does not come with these facilities.

Analysts and researcher are confident that the customer-focused market is growing rapidly. Support for self-registration and social network logins is now nearly ubiquitous among vendors; and the key differentiators have become the use of new technologies to comply with privacy regulations(GDPR, CCPA), to step up the user’s authentication assurance level, to collect and analyze information for fraud prevention or marketing purposes.

As a conclusion, we could say that many other aspects are added to CIAM to make it capable of handling real-time challenges and for now it successfully keeps the perfect balance between meeting the needs of consumers and the perspectives of a business.