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. Such CIAM solutions will operate at extreme scale and performance over different channels of customer interaction, such as web and mobile. This paper will explain the five pillars of CIAM — the core underlying technology required to support the key features of a CIAM solution.