¶ CIAM and EIAM

¶ What are IAM, EIAM and CIAM?

IAM: Identity and Access Management, or identity management for short.

In fact, looking back over the past two decades, when we discuss IAM, most people actually think of internal products that provide unified identity authentication and authorization management capabilities for internal employees, partners, and temporary personnel (Enterprise Identity & Access Management, EIAM). However, you cannot only discuss and develop only EIAM due to the tradition and simplicity of EIAM, which is a lack of imagination.

As the boundary of software expands to all aspects of our lives, the need for unified management of identities has also continued to expand the boundaries. Take the enterprise as the core, the enterprise also began to accommodate a large number of external customer identities, which bring Customer Identity & Access Management (CIAM) to customers, especially for Internet users. For example, the identity management of engineers and couriers in JD belongs to EIAM, while the identity management of sellers and buyers in e-commerce platforms belongs to CIAM.

¶ What is IDaaS Today?

Since 2015, service providers such as Accenture and AWS have taken the lead in treating CIAM as an independent and necessary product. Completely different from EIAM products that take efficiency as the core, CIAM’s goal is to assist companies in completing the overall information transformation, unifying user identities in all external services. In the battle for users with experience as the core, CIAM provides end users with a complete identity self-service, provide a unified and smooth use and registration experience for users on different platforms, in this way, it can improve the retention and stickiness of users, further create value, and get ahead in the industry competition.

"The unique requirements of customer identity management, especially the requirements for scale, performance, availability, and seamless use of cross-platforms, make CIAM an independent market, completely different from EIAM for employee identity management.-Forrester"

So, what is IDaaS today? It is not just to upload EIAM that appeared 20 years ago to the cloud, but to upload both EIAM & CIAM to the cloud to help enterprises move towards the overall digital transformation with a complete IDaaS.

¶ Why did Companies Start to Use EIAM & CIAM IDaaS?

Today's leading IDaaS service providers are committed to providing enterprises with ready-to-use, secure and scalable user management and authentication services. With the help of IDaaS, the employees of enterprise from IT R&D, operation and maintenance can quickly manage the connection of any application, personnel or device. Whether it is a customer, member or partner, whether it is on the cloud, local or on a mobile device, IDaaS service providers can help the IT services of government or enterprise become more secure, increase the launch speed of external core business and the productivity of internal personnel without losing compliance.