Ping Identity solutions for Customer Identity and Access Management

Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) is a rapidly growing specialty within IAM, driven by the need for better digital experiences and deeper understanding of consumers. Organizations increasingly need to collect, store, and analyze customer data to improve loyalty, enable new sales opportunities, and meet regulatory obligations such as Know Your Customer (KYC) for reducing money laundering, cyber-crime, terrorist financing, and fraud. CIAM solutions typically support self-registration or bulk import, consent mechanisms, SSO across digital properties, multiple authentication options, unified profiles, fine-grained access control, flexible deployment (on-premise and/or cloud), and the ability to scale to millions of users while meeting performance and availability SLAs.

Key business drivers include consolidating fragmented identity silos into “One IAM” with SSO to reduce password sprawl and help-desk costs, using progressive profiling to build richer customer views over time, and preparing for regulatory and competitive shifts such as PSD2, which introduces new payment and account aggregation roles (PISPs and AISPs) that increase competition and make direct customer engagement essential. Consent management is central: users must be able to control attribute collection and usage across jurisdictions, be notified of changes, and have choices propagate across the enterprise; GDPR heightens the stakes with strict PII processing requirements and significant penalties.

Implementation challenges include aligning IT with marketing-led initiatives, deciding when to extend workforce IAM versus deploying a dedicated CIAM (especially at massive scale with unauthoritative data sources), modernizing infrastructure for projected peaks, and choosing cloud versus on-prem architectures. The paper positions Ping Identity’s components—PingFederate, PingID, PingDirectory, PingDataGovernance, and PingAccess—as an integrated approach to federation, MFA, high-scale profile storage, consent and privacy enforcement, and policy-based access control.

• CIAM is described as the fastest growing specialty in IAM to meet evolving business requirements.
• CIAM solutions can provide self-registration and also support bulk import of customer identities from existing systems.
• CIAM platforms can enable SSO across digital properties and offer multiple authentication options based on policy and risk.
• CIAM systems can be deployed on-premise, in the cloud, or in hybrid models.
• PSD2 is stated to come into effect within 2 years of 25 November 2015 across the EU.
• PSD2 defines Payment Initiation Service Providers (PISPs) and Account Information Service Providers (AISPs).
• Traditional IAM commonly scales to environments of hundreds of thousands of users.
• CIAM systems must be able to manage millions of identities and potentially process billions of logins and transactions per day.
• PingDirectory is described as scaling to millions of identities, billions of attributes, and up to 2.5 billion transactions per day.
• PingFederate supports federation protocols including SAML, OpenID, OpenID Connect, OAuth, WS-Federation, and WS-Trust.

• “Creating new ways to engage customers online is a mandatory business strategy.”
• “Customers want a pleasant, consistent digital experience when interacting with brands across all channels and devices.”
• “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 a CIAM service in the cloud is usually faster”
• “Consent management is critical for GDPR compliance.”