As discussed in my previous article (below), CIAM plays a crucial role when it comes to building B2C and B2B SaaS applications and managing a CIAM integration typically requires the handling of a broad array of scenarios: ranging from user management and privacy concerns to scaling for millions of users and ensuring seamless integration across multiple platforms.
As systems evolve, it becomes crucial to manage rapid deployment, agile changes, and continuous monitoring as part of the software development lifecycle (SDLC) too. My name’s Peter Fernandez, and in this article, I’m going to discuss some of the fundamental aspects you need to consider and why you should take an API-first approach to modern Customer Identity & Access Management.
What is an API-First Approach?
One of the most significant trends in modern software development is the adoption of an API-first approach. This is essentially where one or more APIs are implemented to allow command and control/management of the various aspects of a software system implementation.
The term API — a.k.a. Application Program Interface — refers to the backend implementation that allows systems to communicate consistently via an HTTP interface.
The API-first approach is becoming increasingly more valuable in the context of CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment) pipelines, too, where the ability to integrate with existing tooling provides for automated system configuration and management, as well as for self-service configuration and provisioning. In a CIAM context, an API-first approach is also highly beneficial for several additional reasons:
In a CIAM context, adopting an API-first approach typically means leveraging some application-independent IdP and/or Authorization Server implementation via an API.
- Decoupled Development: By focusing on leveraging API-first CIAM services, like an IdP, as part of the development architecture, teams can develop independent microservices or components that interact through well-defined interfaces. This is particularly pertinent where standards-based protocols like OIDC and OAuth 2.0 are used, reducing the complexity of maintaining tightly coupled systems and enabling easier updates or replacements of components.
- Consistency Across Platforms: APIs offer a uniform interface for integrating with multiple platforms, whether it’s a web application, mobile app, or third-party services. A standards-based API-first approach provides a consistent way to interact with a CIAM implementation, ensuring that changes in one environment don’t break integration with others.
- Faster Releases: With an API-first approach, incorporating CIAM features for user authentication and authorization means that integration can be implemented, tested, and deployed independently. This aligns with CI/CD best practices, enabling faster iteration and a more reliable deployment pipeline; new features or updates to CIAM systems can be rolled out incrementally, reducing the risk of downtime or disruptions.
- Improved Security and Compliance: Security policies and compliance checks are crucial in a CIAM system. With an API-first approach, the security requirements (such as encryption, MFA, and access control) can be baked in, particularly when using standards like OAuth 2.0. This also makes auditing and compliance tracking more straightforward, as security protocols can be tested and enforced consistently across all integrations.
- Easier Integration and Extensibility: An API-first design allows for easier integration with new tools, services, or third-party applications. In environments where the toolchain often evolves rapidly, the ability to quickly integrate new capabilities, especially those that leverage CIAM, without major overhauls, is crucial.
- Support for Microservices: Many SaaS vendors adopt a microservices architecture, and APIs are typically regarded as the foundation for this. By leveraging APIs, CIAM systems can be integrated into a broader ecosystem of microservices that support user authentication, identity verification, and access control. This modular approach allows for better scalability, flexibility, and fault tolerance/isolation.
Key Scenarios
The first point of interaction a user typically has with a CIAM system is through the process of (interactive) authentication — i.e. a process which typically includes Registration and Login. But CIAM goes beyond just the authentication process: authorisation, management, scalability and compliance are all key aspects of a CIAM solution that need to be addressed, and an API-first approach makes that a lot easier to achieve.
Authentication
Login and registration scenarios might involve the use of Federation and/or Social providers, where users can sign in using their credentials from platforms like Google or Facebook (in addition to the traditional username/password approach). Either of these will likely involve the capture of potentially sensitive user data (such as name, email, age, etc.) to create a digital identity that will be used throughout the customer lifecycle.
Whilst the capture of user data is more common during registration, Progressive Profiling, often used as part of the Login process, means that user data capture can occur as part of user authentication too.
The management of such identity scenarios can become complex, particularly with federation, which typically involves establishing trust relationships with various identity providers and managing different standards for authentication (i.e. SAML and OIDC). Consider, too, cases where multiple authentication mechanisms such as Single Sign-On (SSO), Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), and even biometric authentication need to be handled as part of the strategy for some, if not all, of the authenticating clients.
An API-first approach offered by a CIAM IdP allows authentication services to be exposed to the various clients — e.g. mobile apps, web applications, and third-party platforms — that make up a SaaS solution while maintaining a consistent experience across all user interactions. Leveraging an API-first approach to integrate different authentication methods and protocols (e.g., OAuth 2.0, OIDC and/or SAML) makes developing an implementation easier and more flexible, ensuring a smooth, secure, and scalable way of managing external authentication sources.
For B2C and B2B SaaS, the use of OIDC within the application is the recommended approach for authentication, leveraging a protocol that’s already API-first by design.
Authorization
Leveraging OAuth 2.0 provides an API-first approach to authorisation by design. Not only does it support secure access to your own APIs, with user consent, but it also paves the way for enabling access control via mechanisms such as RBAC, ReBAC and ABAC.
A crucial aspect of CIAM is ensuring that the right users have access to the right resources at the right time based on their privileges; in a complex system, users can have varying roles and/or relationships, each with a varying set of permissions. Managing these and ensuring that users are granted access to only the resources they need is key to both security and a seamless user experience.
API-first CIAM integrations offer flexibility in creating, assigning, and managing privileges across different systems and applications. An API-first approach ensures that roles, relationships, and/or associated attributes can be integrated and synchronised across multiple services and applications, improving consistency and reducing the complexity of access control.
Management
System management of a CIAM solution is one aspect: deployment and control of configuration policies and updates, in an automated fashion, provides integration convenience and reduces the risk of errors. Another aspect is user management, and user profile management in particular.
User profiles must not only store information required for authentication, but typically also extend to storing preferences, security settings, and potentially the consent data for the purpose of regulatory compliance and informing interactive UX.
A robust CIAM integration would not only allow profile information to be safely and securely managed by customer services/administration personnel but would also allow the customer to update or delete their profile information in a self-service fashion, again with secure processes for ensuring that changes are logged and validated.
The use of APIs plays a crucial role in maintaining accuracy and consistency across multiple touchpoints, ensuring that changes made in one part of the system, like an update to an email address, say, propagate correctly to other parts of the infrastructure.
Scalability
SaaS platform solutions often require CIAM integrations that need to be scalable and capable of handling large volumes of users and requests; B2B SaaS solutions have the added complexity of supporting a multi-tenant approach when it comes to user communities. As the user base grows, so do the complexities related to managing data, authentication, and access control. In B2B solutions, CIAM integrations must also be capable of supporting tenants with different security needs, such as varying MFA policies or compliance regulations.
An API-first design is essential in handling scalability, particularly in multi-tenant scenarios, providing a consistent way to manage specific configurations, user groups, and data access policies. It also allows for the rapid scaling of a system, as APIs can be accessed by any component or service without the need for complicated integrations.
Compliance
Privacy regulations such as GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) have made it essential for organisations to manage customer consent and ensure that user data is handled appropriately. A CIAM integration needs to facilitate the management of consent for various data processing activities, like using personal data for marketing, third-party sharing, or product improvements.
Another key concern is the ability to delete or anonymise user data upon request. Managing consent preferences and ensuring that a user’s privacy settings are honoured across all services requires close integration between the CIAM system and the other parts of the technology stack.
In this case, an API-first approach enables easier integration of consent management with other internal systems, such as marketing platforms or third-party analytics tools. It ensures that when a user changes their preferences or requests data deletion, those changes can be synchronised across the entire infrastructure.
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