If your customers and clientele don’t feel secure using your products and/or accessing your corporate websites, web portals, and web shops, they won’t sign up, share information, or otherwise engage with your brand. Developing a robust approach to customer identity and access management, aka CIAM, is essential for building this trust. But many CIOs and CISOs don’t understand CIAM and why it’s so important. In this first episode of our 5-episode podcast, The C-level Strategic Guide for CIAM Investment, we explore the basics of CIAM. “It’s all about accurately identifying your customers, establishing a digital identity, and then serving your customers based on that established digital identity,” says Swaroop Sham, Group Product Marketing Manager at Okta. “To put it another way, the focus of CIAM is to solve the needs of marketing, security and privacy, to clearly identify and meet the needs of the business, so that you have the right customers onboarded on your platform, verified and having the right level of access into the applications that you serve to them.” Equally important: understanding the most-common challenges and issues around CIAM, says Keith Casey, API Problem Solver at Okta. “CIOs and CISOs have to understand CIAM because, fundamentally they have a seat at the table. Security is often an afterthought in too many situations; and we need to bring that to the forefront.” Once companies have a basic knowledge of the challenges and issues around CIAM, Okta has a means for determining where they fall on the CIAM maturity spectrum, and how to move along that maturity scale. Listen in to learn all the details.  Produced by IDG Communications, Inc. in association with Okta.