Your Gateway to a Simple, Modern and Adaptable CIAM Architecture

Customer identity and access management (CIAM) is essential for digital transformation. But finding the right CIAM solution for your unique business needs can be an arduous journey. Creating value through your CIAM architecture means bridging the gaps between the growing number of business applications, APIs, and microservices.

Easier said than done, right? It’s no secret that each business unit and department often maintains their own applications, which despite the best of intentions, are often counterproductive to the larger digital transformation project. The larger the organization, the more this has the potential to snowball into a serious enterprise application architecture nightmare. Managing such an architecture becomes a monumental task for the CIAM team when they must reach out to individual business units across the globe that manage multiple applications. The impediments to scaling operations are obvious in this type of situation.

So what’s the best CIAM architecture for your business?

You need an identity architecture that’s simple, consistent, modernized, and adaptable in order to scale your business capabilities into the future. Advanced CIAM capabilities enable your business to innovate and evolve with your customer population and emerging trends.

Bridge the gaps with identity gateways

Identity gateways enable a non-invasive integration path, as simple as header attributes or identity tokens (e.g. JWT), without the need to install IAM-specific software within applications or containers. This is useful because many organizations have existing legacy services that cannot easily be re-coded and integrated into newer architectures. It also enables you to quickly and consistently apply security patches and updates across your organization, no matter how large.  

With a simplified backend framework – and a smaller software footprint – you can ensure your identity processes, standards, and token types can readily modernize, and adopt emerging technologies. Ultimately, integrating a simple, consistent, and adaptable identity architecture improves security and experience for your CIAM team, business divisions, and your customers.

For more on how to bridge identity to your business, visit ForgeRock Identity Gateway.