Orchestrated Identity for Meeting IAM & CIAM Requirements

Identity and Access Management (IAM) underpins modern electronic interactions by combining directories, authentication, authorization, access controls, SSO, federation, privileged access, and lifecycle/governance. Traditional enterprise IAM was built for perimeter-based, on‑premises environments and standardized employee identities (often in LDAP/Active Directory), ensuring least-privilege access to internal resources. As organizations expanded from B2E into B2B, B2C, and B2IoT, federation and SSO extended identity across systems and even across organizational boundaries. Cloud adoption (IaaS/PaaS/SaaS), mobile, BYOD, and growing IoT footprints are pushing security toward a perimeter-less model where confidence in users and their devices becomes central.

Consumer IAM (CIAM) has emerged as a fast-growing specialty to improve digital experiences, unify scattered consumer data, and enable data-driven engagement that boosts sales and loyalty. CIAM also supports regulatory needs such as Know Your Customer (KYC) and anti-money-laundering (AML) by enabling richer customer profiling, analytics, and detection of anomalous behavior. PSD2 in the EU introduces new roles (PISPs and AISPs), increasing competition and making direct customer engagement—and thus CIAM—strategically important. Consent management is critical: users must get granular control over what data is collected, imported (including from social profiles), and shared, especially under GDPR.

Architecturally, organizations must decide whether to extend enterprise IAM to consumers or deploy a dedicated CIAM system and federate it with employee IAM. Key determinants include scale (millions of identities, potentially billions of logins), schema flexibility for unstructured profiles, operational independence from legacy constraints, and infrastructure readiness (network, DMZ, data center, web/app tiers). Pirean’s Access: One positions a multi-tenant IDaaS/CIAM platform supporting federation standards, social logins, MFA and risk-adaptive controls, scalable profile storage, encryption, SIEM integration, and analytics derived from token and log data, with deployment options in cloud or containerized on-premises environments.

• IAM systems typically include directories, authentication, authorization/access controls, SSO, federation, privilege management, and lifecycle/governance.
• Enterprise user accounts are often stored in LDAP or OpenID formats to hold attributes used for access control.
• Many B2E IAM deployments have been in place for years or decades and are often difficult to upgrade.
• CIAM solutions commonly provide self-registration, bulk import, consent mechanisms, SSO across digital properties, multiple authentication options, profile hosting, SaaS integration, and fine-grained access control.
• Regulators require banks and financial service providers to implement mechanisms for Knowing Your Customer to combat money laundering, cyber-crime, terrorist financing, and fraud.
• PSD2 takes effect across the EU in 2018 and defines Payment Initiation Service Providers (PISPs) and Account Information Service Providers (AISPs).
• CIAM systems can be required to manage millions of identities and process potentially billions of logins and transactions per day.
• Cloud-based IAM/CIAM setups are usually faster to establish than on-premises deployments.
• Pirean Access: One supports SAML, OpenID, OpenID Connect, and OAuth for federation and SSO.
• Access: One integrates out-of-the-box with social identity providers including Facebook, Google, Instagram, Line, LinkedIn, PayPal, Twitter, and Weibo.

• “Knowing Your Customer is not just a competitive advantage, but is also a necessary strategy for increasing revenue and complying with regulations.”
• “PSD2 will create new competition for as well as business opportunities for financial institutions, and direct customer engagement will be essential”
• “CIAM solutions are generally designed for very high-scale utilization”
• “Setting up IAM and CIAM services in the cloud is usually faster”
• “Creating new ways to engage customers with a consistent omni-channel experience is a mandatory business strategy.”
• “Privacy compliance and fine-grained consent management are top concerns for organizations doing business with or within the EU today.”
• “Many organizations need both capabilities.”
• “Enterprises want to collect, store, and analyze data on consumers to create additional sales opportunities and increase brand loyalty.”
• “As organizations increasingly move from a perimeter-based security model to a perimeter-less one, greater emphasis will be placed on what you know about the user and the devices they use.”
• “This approach seeks to utilize a single product or platform to meet the needs for employee and consumer-facing IAM requirements.”