WSO2 Asgardeo

Consumer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) has grown out of enterprise IAM into a distinct market focused on consumer and citizen use cases. Organizations increasingly need to deliver smoother digital experiences while collecting, storing, and analyzing consumer data to better match offerings to demand and strengthen loyalty. CIAM platforms provision, authenticate, authorize, and manage consumer identities at massive scale, often ingesting identity data from many unauthoritative sources and serving not only access control, but also marketing analytics and Anti-Money Laundering initiatives. Because CIAM must support millions of identities and potentially billions of transactions daily, SaaS delivery is becoming the default.

Core CIAM capabilities include diverse authentication methods (OTP, biometrics, push, FIDO, social login, and risk-adaptive/continuous approaches), privacy and consent management aligned with major regulations (GDPR, PIPEDA, CCPA), IoT device-to-identity association, identity analytics, API extensibility, robust account recovery, and Account TakeOver protection using fraud and compromised-credential intelligence. Many vendors are “API-first,” aligning CIAM implementations with microservices and “Identity Fabrics,” and CIAM projects can help IT partner more closely with Marketing.

WSO2’s Asgardeo is a cloud CIAM/IDaaS offering derived from the on-premises WSO2 Identity Server, complemented by Choreo (cloud-native engineering platform) and API Manager for integration and security. Asgardeo supports white-labeling, broad federation standards, many authenticators, adaptive authentication with configurable flows, and privacy self-service. It runs on Microsoft Azure with microservices architecture, flexible profile storage options, and integrations with major IDaaS providers. Reported performance includes over 1 million logins per hour at up to 250 ms latency and a 99.9% uptime SLA. Key gaps include missing family management, lack of a dedicated consumer IoT dashboard, and pending FIDO 2.0 certification (planned for 2022).

• CIAM solutions can be required to manage many millions of identities and process potentially billions of logins and transactions per day.
• SaaS delivery of CIAM services is trending upward and is expected to remain the default choice for most organizations.
• WSO2 was founded in 2005 and is headquartered in the Bay Area with offices and customers worldwide.
• WSO2 builds on an open-source base licensed under the Apache 2.0 framework and provides support via annual subscriptions.
• WSO2 Identity Server is WSO2’s IAM/CIAM solution for on-premises deployments.
• Asgardeo is WSO2’s CIAM and IDaaS offering, and Choreo is its cloud-native engineering platform for API developers.
• Asgardeo is hosted within Microsoft Azure and uses a microservices-based architecture.
• Asgardeo supports federation standards including JWT, OAuth2, OpenID Connect, and SAML.
• WSO2 reports some customers achieve more than 1 million logins per hour with latency of no more than 250 ms.
• Asgardeo has a 99.9% uptime SLA.

• “Unlike workforce IAM systems though, information about these consumers often arrives from many unauthoritative sources.”
• “Many CIAM vendors are taking an ‘API-first’ approach to CIAM.”
• “API-driven CIAM architectures may be considered Identity API platforms and are best when instantiated as micro-services.”
• “Deploying CIAM functionality using Identity APIs aligns with the notion of Identity Fabrics.”
• “IT departments should welcome CIAM initiatives, as they provide an opportunity for IT, usually considered a cost center to closely team with Marketing, a revenue producing center.”
• “Consumers are tired of creating and remembering passwords…”
• “An initial, low assurance authentication event is often insufficient for some kinds of transactions…”
• “With fraud on the rise globally, evaluating additional feeds of information that can help reduce the risk of Account TakeOver (ATO) attacks is a paramount concern…”
• “IoT device identity management is more complex than simple one-to-one pairings.”
• “WSO2 recognizes that ‘developer’ is not a monolithic term.”