Akamai’s 3 Takeaways from the Gartner CIAM Solution Comparison

by Ashley Adelman on October 9, 2019

We have eagerly awaited Gartner’s analysis of the growing CIAM industry. According to Gartner, in its August 2019 Solution Comparison for Customer Identity and Access Management Capabilities of 9 Vendors, “CIAM offerings are expanding and are now key business enablers for unifying customer experience and streamlining operations.”

The report is only available to Gartner clients, so we’ve compiled our 3 key takeaways that can guide IT and security leaders’ CIAM strategy and vendor selection:

“Choose a CIAM Offering That Can Be a Platform for Your Long-Range Digital Business Vision” – Gartner advises, “identity and access management is the foundation for digital business. Selecting a CIAM tool is selecting a platform that will mediate your digital interactions with your customers. When choosing a CIAM solution, don’t just consider current requirements. Reach out to business units to identify new customer initiatives that could impact your solution choice.” While CIAM effectively solves short-term needs, such as registration and authentication, it has powerful marketing and compliance capabilities that transcend business functions. Engage your peers in marketing, security, and compliance to understand broader customer experience and data privacy initiatives that could be served by CIAM.
“Don’t Develop Your CIAM Solution From Scratch” – Even the most development-oriented teams should not build their CIAM solution from scratch. Gartner states, “there are now a wide range of robust, highly scalable CIAM solutions available. Even if your organization will be developing some parts of your new CIAM system, Gartner strongly discourages organizations from developing a system completely from scratch.” Choose a CIAM vendor that best aligns with your needs, resources, and identity protocol requirements, such as SAML, OAuth, and OIDC.
“Select a CIAM Tool That Is Suited for Your Industry and Regulatory Environment” – Disparate data privacy regulations are an increasingly prevalent challenge for global brands. CIAM vendors have varying support for consent management and authentication capabilities required to comply with GDPR, CCPA, PIPEDA, and other regional privacy regulations. Make sure your chosen solution provides the mechanisms to support compliance requirements such as the right to be forgotten, consent collection, and other common data privacy stipulations.

How Akamai Identity Cloud Measures Up

Akamai Identity Cloud (formerly Janrain) has been providing enterprise-grade CIAM for the world’s leading brands since 2002. With deep roots in social login, SSO, and authentication protocols, Identity Cloud is well positioned for marketing use cases due to our native analytics capabilities, progressive profiling, and integrations with CRM and marketing analytics tools.

Akamai Identity Cloud works best for global brands looking to better manage millions of customer identities, enable omnichannel registration at scale, comply with CCPA, GDPR, and other regional data privacy regulations, and drive digital transformation.