CIAM Educational Resources

Heya.

I had someone ask me where they could go to learn about customer identity and access management.

Here’s a list of CIAM resources I check out for this newsletter and to keep on top of industry trends. All are free unless otherwise noted.

• IDPro

  • The IDPro body of knowledge is great for general identity knowledge and has some articles about CIAM.

  • The IDPro Slack has a CIAM channel with some experts in there. Not free, you have to be a member.

• Other slacks

  • The Rands leadership Slack has many many channels, but the CIAM related ones are #architecture and #identitymanagement. The former is more wide ranging but has more folks in it.

  • The CIAM Weekly Slack includes all kinds of links I find. Not free.

• Reddit

  • The Cybersecurity Reddit occasionally has identity content occasionally.

  • The Webdev Reddit covers authentication amongst many other topics.

  • There’s an IAM Reddit that is more workforce focused.

  • /r/IdentityManagement is low traffic but focused on identity.

• Discords

  • Not aware of any discords, unfortunately. If you know of any, please reply and let me know.

• Podcasts

  • There are a lot of podcasts about identity, but the best ones about CIAM are not currently updated. But still worth listening to.

• CIAM related newsletters

  • I have some substack recommendations

• Social networks

  • There’s definitely discussion around identity and CIAM on Twitter, BlueSky and LinkedIn, but a lot of it is driven by vendors and is not centralized.

  • Searching for top HackerNews authentication stories in the past year gives a good set of reading material.

• Vendor blogs

  • These are obviously biased toward vendors, but can be a good source of info. I’ve been collecting the vendor blogs that have RSS feeds.

    • If you are a CIAM vendor and would like your blog feed added, please reply and let me know.

• Individual blogs

  • Aaron Parecki’s blog

  • Phil Windley’s blog

• Standards bodies

  • The IETF OAuth mailing list has great discussions about nerdier aspects of identity.

  • The OpenID foundation has a general mailing list that is markedly quieter, but other specialized ones are more active.

• Identity conferences (none of these are free)

  • Identiverse

  • Identity Week

  • IIW

  • AuthCon

  • Oktane

Hope this helps you keep on top of CIAM trends!

Dan