An Interview With Alex Ward - CIAM Weekly
Alex Ward is a freelance auth consultant and fiction writer in Portland, Oregon. He runs and maintains authomnibus.com. Alex first became fascinated with auth protocols when working at a white-label social networking company after being tasked with implementing SAML. After spending a lot of time reading the spec and dissecting SimpleSAMLPhp, he was hooked and has worked on auth systems in between other roles for nearly two decades. When not consulting, he spends his time making Tabletop RPGs, writing dark fantasy stories, and spending time with his wife and 3 cats.
Alex: I work with a wide variety of folks, ranging from smaller companies primarily doing B2B SaaS products all the way up to large enterprise organizations with millions of B2C accounts across multiple CIAM solutions depending on their business unit. I think the common denominator when either they’ve already got a CIAM in place or when they’re looking for me to help them evaluate one, is that authentication is complex. They want a trusted system that can handle all the ways a customer can authenticate, and they want it done securely. Past that, they tend to have more complex requirements like account joins, connecting with customer IdPs, MFA, step-up auth, configurable automated security checking, and the like.
Silent login and SSO are also really common requirements. Those are tricky to implement safely from scratch and harder to maintain without some sort of CIAM system in place.
