47
Misconfigurations
Identified
Frictionless
Login experience for customers
MFA
Built into every auth flow
SSO
Single sign-on across products
Zero Trust
Customer access verified continuously
CIAM Architecture & Platform Selection
Choosing the right CIAM platform requires understanding your application architecture, expected user scale, compliance requirements, and UX goals. We evaluate Okta Customer Identity Cloud (Auth0), AWS Cognito, Azure AD B2C, and custom OIDC implementations: recommending the platform that fits your requirements without over-engineering.
Authentication Flow Design & Implementation
We design and implement authentication flows for your customer-facing applications: login, registration, password reset, MFA enrollment, and social login. Authentication flows are designed to minimize friction for legitimate users while making brute force, credential stuffing, and account takeover attacks ineffective.
Customer MFA & Fraud Prevention
Consumer MFA requires different UX considerations than workforce MFA: users will abandon applications that make authentication too difficult. We implement adaptive MFA that triggers strong authentication based on risk signals: new device, unusual location, high-value transaction: without requiring MFA for every low-risk login.
Social Login & Federation Integration
Social login (Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook) reduces registration friction and eliminates password management for customers. We implement social identity providers using OIDC federation, handling token validation, user profile mapping, and account linking for customers who use multiple social providers.
Privacy & Consent Management
CIAM systems handle consumer personal information and must comply with GDPR, CCPA, and applicable privacy regulations. We implement consent management flows, privacy preference centers, and data subject rights workflows: right to delete, right to access, opt-out management: built into the CIAM platform.
Credential Stuffing & Account Takeover Prevention
Consumer credentials are continuously tested by automated credential stuffing attacks using leaked password databases. We implement bot detection, breached password screening, device fingerprinting, and adaptive risk scoring to detect and block account takeover attempts without degrading experience for legitimate customers.
What Makes Us Different From Others
- Security AND UX Together We balance security requirements with user experience goals: implementing strong authentication without the friction that causes users to abandon applications.
- Adaptive Risk-Based Authentication We implement risk scoring so strong authentication challenges appear when risk is elevated: not for every login: reducing friction while maintaining security.
- Privacy Compliance Built In CIAM implementations handle consumer personal data subject to GDPR and CCPA. We design consent management and data subject rights into the CIAM architecture from the start.
- Credential Stuffing Prevention Consumer applications are the primary target for automated credential stuffing attacks. We implement bot detection and breached credential screening as a standard part of every CIAM deployment.
- Scale Planning Consumer-facing authentication needs to scale with user growth. We design CIAM architectures that handle millions of users without performance degradation.
Our AWS environment had grown organically for three years and nobody had ever done a security review. garrisonOne found 47 misconfigurations in a single assessment: public S3 buckets, overly permissive IAM roles, unencrypted data at rest. Everything was remediated in six weeks and we passed our SOC 2 cloud controls section without a single finding.
Client results
See how we have helped
Financial Services
Accounting Firm — IAM Automation
Manual offboarding across 14 systems took two days. garrisonOne automated the full user lifecycle with HR-driven provisioning and role-based access, cutting offboarding to 10 minutes.
14
Systems under IAM
10m
Offboarding time
100%
MFA coverage
Retail / SMB
Retail SMB — SSO and MFA Rollout
A retail business with password sprawl across 20+ applications. garrisonOne deployed SSO with MFA across the full application stack in under six weeks.
20+
Apps unified under SSO
6 weeks
Full deployment
100%
MFA enforced
Industry focus
Industries we serve
Related Services: Cloud Security | IAM Services | Okta Implementation | SSO Services
Frequently asked questions
What is Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM)?
CIAM is a subset of identity and access management focused specifically on managing consumer and external user identities for customer-facing applications. Unlike workforce IAM, CIAM handles potentially millions of users, prioritizes user experience alongside security, and must comply with consumer privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA.
What is the difference between CIAM and workforce IAM?
Workforce IAM manages employee and contractor identities within a controlled IT environment with IT-administered accounts. CIAM manages self-registered customer identities at internet scale: users onboard themselves, manage their own credentials, and interact via public-facing applications. CIAM requires different platform choices, UX design considerations, and privacy compliance approaches.
What CIAM platforms does garrisonOne implement?
We implement Okta Customer Identity Cloud (formerly Auth0), AWS Cognito, Azure AD B2C, and Google Cloud Identity Platform. For most organizations building or modernizing customer-facing applications, Okta CIC (Auth0) provides the most comprehensive feature set with the best developer experience. Platform choice depends on your application framework, existing cloud investments, and scale requirements.
What is credential stuffing and how does CIAM prevent it?
Credential stuffing is an automated attack where attackers use lists of leaked username-password combinations: obtained from other site breaches: to attempt login to your application. Protection requires breached password screening (checking credentials against known-leaked databases), bot detection to identify automated attack traffic, and adaptive authentication that requires step-up verification when suspicious patterns are detected.
How does CIAM handle GDPR and CCPA compliance?
CIAM systems process consumer personal information and must support privacy rights including consent management, right to erasure, right to access, and data portability. We implement consent flows that collect and store consent with appropriate granularity, data subject request workflows that fulfill deletion and access requests, and audit logs that document all consent and privacy decisions.
How long does a CIAM implementation take?
A CIAM implementation for a single application with standard authentication flows, social login, and MFA typically takes four to eight weeks. Complex implementations with custom consent management, multiple app