Salesforce Identity

Salesforce, founded in 1999 in San Francisco, began as CRM delivered as SaaS and expanded through acquisitions and development into a broad portfolio spanning sales, marketing, analytics, storage, and application solutions. Salesforce Identity serves as the IAM foundation for Salesforce and is also sold as Identity-as-a-Service (IDaaS) and as a Consumer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) platform.

Traditional IAM focuses on provisioning, authentication, authorization, and governance for employee identities, typically using directories, federation, web access management, and authoritative sources for roles and attributes. Historically deployed on-premises for a single enterprise, IAM increasingly expanded to include partners, suppliers, and customers through federation. However, modern cloud-heavy organizations and digital transformation needs are pushing adoption of cloud-based IDaaS and specialized CIAM platforms.

CIAM addresses consumer-scale identity needs: self-registration, social login, variable assurance authentication, unified profiles, fine-grained access control, and the ability to handle millions of identities and extremely high transaction volumes. Consumer data commonly originates from non-authoritative sources and is collected not only for access decisions but also for marketing analytics and AML-related initiatives.

Salesforce Identity is a multi-tenant, cloud-native solution supporting SAML, OpenID, OpenID Connect, OAuth, and FIDO U2F, plus Salesforce Authenticator (push and TOTP) and Lightning Login (biometric challenge/response). It offers delegated administration via APIs, SCIM provisioning (v1.1 native, v2.0 via Apex package), and extensive integration options (REST most common; no direct LDAP, but integration via APIs and an Active Directory bridge, Identity Connect). Risk-based authentication can incorporate third-party signals and terminate sessions; Event Monitoring exports logs to SIEMs. Strong analytics, reporting, and Marketing Cloud synchronization position it as SSO/federation gateway, CIAM layer, or full IDaaS/CIAM suite, with reported operation at 100+ million identities, 4+ billion daily transactions, and CIAM tenants in the tens of millions.

• Salesforce was founded in 1999 and is based in San Francisco with offices around the world.
• Salesforce Identity is offered as both IDaaS and for CIAM use cases.
• Salesforce Identity supports SAML, OpenID, OpenID Connect, OAuth, and FIDO U2F for authentication.
• Salesforce Authenticator provides out-of-band mobile push authorization and functions as an OATH TOTP client.
• Lightning Login uses built-in biometrics for challenge/response authentication and requires Salesforce Authenticator version 2 or later.
• Salesforce was a major contributor to the SCIM provisioning protocol and supports SCIM 1.1 natively and SCIM 2.0 via an Apex package.
• LDAP is not supported directly, but Active Directory can be addressed through the on-premise bridge Salesforce Identity Connect.
• Salesforce Event Monitoring can export log data for SIEM analysis tools such as Splunk.
• Salesforce Identity currently manages 100+ million identities for 150,000+ customers globally and processes 4+ billion transactions per day.
• The largest CIAM tenant is reported to contain tens of millions of identities.

• “Consumer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) is the fastest growing segment within the overall category of IAM.”
• “Traditional IAM systems are designed to provision, authenticate, authorize, and store information about employee users.”
• “Today, many organizations have identity requirements that transcend the limitations of legacy IAM architectures.”
• “Enterprises want to collect, store, and analyze data on consumers to create additional sales opportunities and increase brand loyalty.”
• “Consumer IAM systems are designed to provision, authenticate, authorize, collect and store information about consumers from across many domains.”
• “Unlike regular IAM systems though, information about these consumers often arrives from many non-authoritative sources.”
• “Salesforce Identity can be white-labeled, to offer customers complete brand control.”
• “Salesforce Identity is designed to be omni-channel, offering the same features and consistent feel across web, mobile, and IoT devices.”
• “Salesforce utilizes risk-based authentication to verify users.”
• “The solution is only offered as a cloud service, which could be an issue for potential customers preferring on-premise deployments.”