CIAM, foundation for digital business
The digital revolution took hold more rapidly than anyone could have imagined. In order to survive – let alone thrive – in today’s environment, organisations must embrace a fully digital mindset. They need to provide consumers with frictionless access to their services from anywhere, anytime and any device.
As acknowledged by Gartner, Consumer Identity and Access Management (or: CIAM) is a core discipline to support digital business initiatives. With CIAM, organisations can provide customers with a single digital identity for instant access to online applications and services, while at the same time complying with legislative requirements such as GDPR. On the long term, this will enhance the relationship with customers, adding trust to the package. 
Why is CIAM so important?
The demand for fast, easy access to services through multichannel interactions can expose gaps and inefficiencies in consumer-facing processes. These gaps are often the result of disparate processes for different lines of business. Or they are caused by the use of regular Identity & Access Management (IAM) implementations that were initially designed to support IAM for employees; these implementations are either not designed to be resilient to change, or do not support multi-stepped and multi-faceted customer journeys.
The very nature of the products and services that digital organisations offer to consumers presents several critical challenges (see image below):
1. Different login and information experiences across a variety of services and device
Providing different user apps and/or portals to access different services creates friction as consumers need multiple log-ins for interacting with one single organisation.
2. The ability for consumers to view, edit, download and delete their data
To empower the consumer and with GDPR in full force, organisations must provide consumers with easy access to their data allowing them to edit, delete and download it at any point in time. Not only do most organisations lack such an overview, the data is often stored in multiple back-end systems making it virtually impossible to extract the data at all... leaving alone the costs associated with it.
3. High back-end complexity which leads to high Total Cost of Ownership
Each back-end system needs the appropriate levels of security and IAM capabilities to manage access and consumer data the right way. This is both complex and highly expensive.
4. Proof of GDPR compliancy across all systems
With consumer data being stored and managed in different back-end systems, GDPR auditors face a difficult and labour-intensive task. Proving GDPR compliancy requires extracting data manually from a number of different back- end systems.
Maximise flexibility and privacy with CIAM
CIAM (or: Consumer IAM) is designed to meet all requirements to compete in today's fast-changing, multi-channel business environment by allowing organisations to. By collecting and storing all consumer identity data in one platform, organisations and consumers reap a variety of benefits (see overview below):
1. One frictionless experience across all channels
With CIAM capabilities such as easy registration, social login and Single Sign-On (SSO), organisations can offer their consumers one single experience across all channels. All identity data is transferred and stored safely in a single platform.
2. The ability to view and edit data settings and preferences
As required by privacy regulations like GDPR, consumers can view, edit and delete their data, either via a branded portal solution or in the organisation’s own portal environment (via iWelcome’s RESTful APIs). Moreover, consumers can easily download an extract of their data (in GDPR referred to as ‘data portability’).
3. Large efficiency gains for internal processes and stakeholders
In many organisations, personal data is stored and managed in different applications or systems. This is inconvenient for multiple stakeholders within an organisation. With all data stored and managed in one CIAM platform, organisations can create one 360-view of their consumers. This helps marketing & sales for cross- and up-selling, customer care can provide better support and compliance officers can gather all required consumer identity data from one single source.
4. Lower IT costs by taking away IAM complexity from different back end systems
A single, centralised CIAM platform eliminates the complexity of managing different data systems for different services, which significantly decreases IT costs.
iWelcome's key CIAM features
A comprehensive and flexible Consumer IAM platform serves consumers, marketeers, IT, security- and data-privacy officers. iWelcome's functionality in twelve fundamental components is shown in the image below.
Consumer IAM & GDPR compliance
On 25 May 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came in full force for all organisations that control and/or process personal data of EU citizens. With little time left on the clock, there is no time to waste for organisations that process or control personal data.
For a large part, GDPR is about how organisations gather, store, protect and manage the lifecycle of that data. And that is exactly where Consumer Identity & Access Management (CIAM) solutions fit in.
It is important to emphasise that not all requirements set by GDPR apply to CIAM. Think of important elements as the appointment of a Digital Privacy Officer (DPO), employee awareness training and the set-up of a Privacy policy.
Instead, at iWelcome we have identified eight important GDPR topics organisations must address with IAM to be GDPR compliant