24d (edited) • Concepts & Questions
Workforce IAM vs CIAM - do you know the difference?
Most people learning IAM start with workforce identity. Employees join, accounts get provisioned, people leave, accounts get disabled. The HR system is the source of truth.
That is one world.
There is a second world that shows up in job descriptions constantly -- Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM).
Sometimes same systems with completely different problems.
Workforce IAM:
- Source of truth is your HR system
- IT controls who gets onboarded
- Users are known before they join any system
- Scale: hundreds or thousands of employees
CIAM:
- Users register themselves or get onboarded by a partner
- Source of truth is the identity platform -- Auth0, Okta, Entra External ID
- The user journey matters -- registration, login, MFA, password reset all need to be seamless
- Scale: millions of users
Both are covered in the free classrooms:
🔹 Classroom 1 -- Your IAM Starting Point: Workforce IAM end to end. HR feeds the IGA system, accounts provision automatically, leaver workflow disables on termination.
🔹 Classroom 2 -- Access Management Hands-On Lab: CIAM in action. Build a real identity provider with Auth0, configure SAML and OIDC, decode live tokens.
Most IAM interviews will ask you which type of identity you are dealing with before anything else. Knowing the difference is the key
Bringing this up on tonight's Weekly IAM Catch-Up -- 8pm Swiss time / 2pm EST.
Check the Calendar tab for the link.
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Workforce IAM vs CIAM - do you know the difference?
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