SAP Customer Data Cloud

Consumer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) has rapidly emerged within IAM as organizations increasingly need better digital experiences and richer consumer data to drive sales opportunities and brand loyalty. CIAM also supports regulatory needs, particularly “Know Your Customer” (KYC) obligations aimed at reducing money laundering, terrorist financing, cyber-crime, and fraud. For GDPR, CIAM enables clear consent capture, consumer self-service dashboards for data sharing choices, consistent privacy policy enforcement, and mechanisms to notify users of terms changes and collect acknowledgements. PSD2 further raises requirements for strong customer authentication and behavioral analysis for transaction authorization, positioning mature CIAM platforms as both compliance enablers and differentiators for customer experience.

SAP Customer Data Cloud (formerly Gigya, acquired by SAP in 2018) is presented as a leading, multi-tenant SaaS CIAM offering. It combines three core products: SAP Customer Identity (identity repository with registration, social login, federation/SSO), SAP Customer Consent (GDPR-aligned consent and preference management, including export and deletion support), and SAP Customer Profile (profile repository with orchestration, governance, analytics, and reporting). The platform emphasizes scale, high availability (99.9% SLA), and omni-channel consistency, including device-to-consumer identity linkage for IoT and media devices, with streamlined pairing methods like QR codes or Bluetooth.

Operationally, SAP provides a UI Builder for rapid creation of registration, authentication, consent, and profile workflows, plus whitelabeling, multi-language support, “Lite Registration,” and progressive profiling. Fraud and risk controls include FunCaptcha and Network Protected Identity for detecting compromised credentials and triggering step-up authentication. Integration is a major theme: “Identity Sync” ETL moves bulk identity data to numerous marketing and engagement platforms, while a broad connector catalog links CIAM data to CMS, eCommerce, CRM, analytics, and marketing tools. Strengths center on ecosystem scale, social login, reporting, consent management, and IoT identity integration; challenges include limited authenticator/MFA breadth and gaps in newer IAM standards (e.g., lack of FIDO, OAuth2 Device Flow, UMA).

• SAP acquired Gigya in 2018 and renamed the combined offering SAP Customer Data Cloud.
• SAP Customer Data Cloud is delivered as a fully multi-tenant SaaS solution.
• The platform has over 700 customers across industries including media, entertainment, ecommerce, health care, finance, travel, education, consumer packaged goods, and communications.
• SAP hosts more than 1.4 billion consumer identities.
• The service stores 1.6 billion consent transactions per month.
• The platform provides device-to-consumer integration for 4 billion consumer devices.
• SAP processes around 18 billion API calls per month.
• The SLA guarantees 99.9% uptime.
• SAP Customer Data Cloud consists of SAP Customer Identity, SAP Customer Consent, and SAP Customer Profile.
• SAP supports LDAP and does not support SCIM.

• “Consumer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) continues to be a fast-growing discipline within Identity and Access Management (IAM)”
• “Enterprises want to collect, store, and analyze data on consumers to create additional sales opportunities and increase brand loyalty.”
• “To reduce money laundering, cyber-crime, terrorist financing, and fraud, regulators are requiring banks and financial service providers to put into place mechanisms for ‘Knowing Your Customer’.”
• “Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU, collecting clear and unambiguous consent from consumers for the use of their data is necessary for compliance.”
• “Sophisticated CIAM solutions can provide these necessary functions.”
• “SAP helps its clients offer a consistent, omni-channel yet personalized experience.”
• “By enabling users to scan a QR code or link via Bluetooth, consumers don’t have to go through the laborious process of entering a full password using their remote control.”
• “SAP Customer Data Cloud includes a Plug and Play User Interface (UI) Builder.”
• “Network Protected Identity (NPI) … provides real-time analysis and alerting on in-network credential compromises.”
• “This, however, has not prevented massive adoption of the solution, including many Fortune 500 and other global companies.”