CIAM Groups: From Basic to Advanced
Heya,
Groups are a fundamental feature of customer identity and access management (CIAM) systems, allowing organizations to efficiently manage user access and permissions. They also allow CIAM systems to group sets of customers or users together without permissions.
Let's take a look at group functionality, from essential implementations to more sophisticated features.
Basic Groups
At its core, every CIAM system should support:
Group Creation: Ability to create and name groups
User Assignment: Add or remove users from groups
Permission Assignment: Grant or revoke permissions for groups
This basic implementation enables organizations to manage user access at scale, simplifying administration and enhancing security.
For instance, you could create a group called `admin`, and give any member of that group admin level permissions in your application. Then, whenever you need to add a new admin user, rather than giving the user account the admin level permissions, you add them to the group.
This approach has two benefits:
When a new admin permission is created, such as when new functionality has been added to an application, you add the permission to the group and all users get it. You don't have to search out all your users and add this new permission to each one.
When a user leaves, you remove them from the admin group. They have no permissions attached directly, so after removal they have no permissions. This kind of quick and easy offboarding is a major advantage of using groups.
This example is simple, but if your application grows in complexity and you end up with millions of users and hundreds of groups, you will appreciate the approach.
You don't always have to have a group with associated permissions. Basic groups can be used to create sets of users for other purposes. For example, tracking cohorts of users based on their acquisition (paid search, TV ad, etc) is a valid use of CIAM groups.
Advanced Group Features
As CIAM needs evolve, more complex group structures and functionalities become valuable:
Nested Groups
Nested groups allow groups to contain other groups. This can simplify management of large, hierarchical organizations or groups of users. This approach enables inheritance of permissions from parent groups.
Dynamic Groups
Dynamic groups automatically assign users to groups based on attributes or behaviors, rather than requiring static assignment/removal. This is useful for segmentation and personalization and can reduce the overhead of group management.
Time-based Group Membership
With time based group membership, you can set activation and expiration datetimes for group membership. This lets you automate temporary access, and can enhance security for short term projects, contractors or actions that require elevated access.
Arbitrary Data Attribute
With an arbitrary data attribute, you can add custom business data to your groups. This can then be used for a variety of purposes, including management tooling and auditability.
Group Change Notifications
By implementing group change notifications, you can integrate your group membership data with other systems. Messages can be sent using any transport layer, but webhooks are a common choice.
Cross-domain Groups
Cross-domain groups span multiple domains or applications, whereas simple groups can be limited to a single domain or application. These streamline user grouping and access control in complex, distributed environments.
Group Analytics and Reporting
Group analytics allw you insights into group compositions and access patterns. They can help identify potential security risks or inefficiencies and support compliance and auditing requirements
Summing Up
Implementing these advanced group features can enhance the flexibility and power of your CIAM system, enabling more sophisticated identity and access management strategies.
Not every application or CIAM system needs every advanced group feature, however. Aim to keep your user and group modelling as simple as possible to avoid complexity and performance concerns.
As organizations grow and their CIAM needs become more complex, leveraging these advanced group management features can help maintain security, improve user experience, and increase operational efficiency.