APIs have been in the technology canvas for nearly two decades now, with almost all the major software vendors releasing their APIs after the year 2000. For example, Salesforce and eBay released their APIs in 2000, Amazon in 2002, and Facebook in 2006. Today, APIs are a fundamental building block in digital business and integrations.

Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM), a subgenre of IAM, enables organizations to scale and ensure secure, seamless digital experiences for their customers, while collecting and managing customer identity data purposefully. Powerful CIAM solutions provide a variety of key features including customer registration, social logins, account verification, self-service account management, consent and preference management, single sign-on (SSO), multi-factor authentication (MFA), and adaptive authentication as well as other nice-to-have features.

Current estimates suggest widespread adoption of open source software (OSS) in organizations worldwide. Compared to sectors such as operating systems and big data, adoption in the security and identity management sector has been low until now. While there were a number of open source projects around libraries for security and identity management-related functionalities, there were only a few projects based on an end-to-end security or identity and access management (IAM) solution.

With the fast-growing popularity of cloud computing, an increasing number of organizations are now moving towards cloud-based solutions. Gartner predicts that1, "by 2020, 90 percent of organizations will adopt hybrid infrastructure management" where some parts of a solution would be in the cloud while other parts would be in traditional on-premises data centers.

Identity and access management (IAM) is the efficient integration and management of identities, giving users access to the right resources at the right time. Identity is no longer a mere security project for enterprises. In the integration and API domain, as businesses continue to increase the number of internal and third-party APIs, it's more important than ever that APIs are integrated and governed securely. In the user domain, with increasing user identity spaces, company-wide policies, complex structure hierarchies and roles, regulatory pressures, and customer-facing applications, security becomes a bigger challenge each day for identity architects and administrators.