Customer identity and access management lets a business's customers and consumers create accounts, sign in and manage their profiles. Microsoft's offering is Microsoft Entra External ID, run in an external tenant.
Also called customer identity and access management.
Read more: Microsoft Learn
In the Ultra Transcenders books
Each book explains CIAM in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.
Terms in this definition
- CRUD
Shorthand for create, read, update and delete, the four basic things you do with data. Data-plane roles in Azure Cosmos DB, for instance, authorise those operations on items.
- AGDLP
Nesting pattern: users go into global groups, which go into domain local groups, which receive the permissions. AGUDLP adds universal groups for forests with several domains.
- MANAGE
A Unity Catalog privilege allowing a principal to grant and revoke access on an object, hand over its ownership and drop it, all without being the owner. It gives no data access by itself and is not part of
ALL PRIVILEGES. - Microsoft Entra External ID
Platform for external identities from Microsoft, spanning B2B collaboration and customer (CIAM) tenants. New customers use it in place of Azure AD B2C.
- External tenant
For consumer and business-customer applications, External ID uses a separate Microsoft Entra tenant set up in its external configuration, distinct from the workforce tenant where staff accounts live.
Related terms
- B2C
Microsoft stopped selling Azure AD B2C to new customers on 1 May 2025. It was the older customer identity (CIAM) offering, now succeeded by Microsoft Entra External ID running in an external tenant.