Building an identity architecture capable of scaling

For IT departments in retail, mass-market distribution, or luxury sectors, managing customer identities is about much more than just a login form. It is the cornerstone of both user experience and data security.  

What is CIAM? CIAM (Customer Identity and Access Management) is the system that handles account creation, authentication, and user consent. It is the foundation that connects customer experience, data security, and regulatory compliance.

A CIAM architecture must be built around a fundamental strategic pillar: scalable architecture. Whether you are dealing with a sudden surge in traffic during a promotion or expanding into new international markets, your CIAM must adapt autonomously and seamlessly. Here is how a cloud-native CIAM approach helps meet these technical and business challenges.

The foundation: a cloud-native SaaS model that makes scalability seamless

An end-to-end managed service

Today, most CIAM solutions operate as SaaS (Software as a Service). The brand does not deploy software on its own servers; instead, it connects to a service hosted in the cloud and accessed via the internet. This is known as a cloud-native solution. The other, traditional model, known as on-premise, involves installing the customer identity management solution directly within the brand's own infrastructure. While still relevant for certain highly regulated sectors, a cloud-based solution offers greater flexibility, scalability, and better cost control.

The benefits of a cloud-native CIAM for a brand

Choosing SaaS is not just a technical decision. It has direct consequences for costs and organizational structure.
With a cloud-native solution, the brand entrusts the provider with all infrastructure-related operations:

• Service deployment
• Operation and maintenance of servers dedicated to this activity  
• Regulatory, technological, and functional compliance updates
• Security for sensitive data
  
• These tasks are handled by dedicated teams at the provider. The brand pays for a service and focuses its resources on its core business. It is this model that makes scaling seamless for the brand. This transparency on the brand side is built upon architectural choices made by the provider from the outset.
• A CIAM architecture designed for identity scalability
• From the very beginning of its architectural design, Purse has integrated this flexibility and capacity to scale by leveraging two complementary levers:
• Vertical scalability: this involves strengthening an existing instance by increasing its power to handle a higher load at a given time.
• Horizontal scalability involves deploying multiple instances to distribute the load or bring the service closer to its users.

This flexibility also extends to how data is organized for merchants. Purse Identity offers two deployment models:

• Multi-tenant model: Multiple clients share the same regional instance, which is often ideal for brands with standard volume requirements.
• Single-tenant model: An instance entirely dedicated to a single client to ensure total isolation of data and resources for very high-volume needs.

This choice of modular infrastructure optimizes both performance and costs across the entire chain, allowing merchants to support their growth with peace of mind.  

Key scalability challenges in customer identity management for merchants

For a merchant, scalability translates into two main scenarios. The first is handling a large number of users simultaneously. The second is serving users in more locations. Each requires a tailored response.

Absorbing traffic spikes with on-demand scaling

The retail sector is inherently subject to strong seasonality and events that generate massive traffic spikes. IT managers are all too familiar with the anxiety of a site crash during a highly anticipated launch. This is where vertical scalability comes in. Historically, vertical scalability meant increasing the power of an existing machine by adding memory or a better processor. In a cloud environment, the principle remains similar: it involves temporarily increasing the instance's capacity to absorb an exceptional load.

Let’s look at examples from our clients. In sports and events, clubs like OGC Nice or Stade Français see their traffic surge within minutes when ticket sales open for highly anticipated matches. In another context, video game companies face heavy loads during major launches, such as the release of the PlayStation 5, which generated exceptional connection peaks.

To meet this specific need without causing long-term infrastructure costs to skyrocket, Purse has developed a specific feature: On-Demand Scaling. This option allows a brand to define in advance a time window during which infrastructure capacity will be boosted. Merchants can schedule resource increases just before a highly anticipated sale begins. Once the event is over, the infrastructure returns to its nominal state, ensuring optimal performance at the critical moment while keeping the budget under control.

Supporting international growth and unifying the customer experience

While vertical scalability handles audience surges, international expansion requires a different approach: horizontal scalability. When a brand expands into Europe, the United States, or Asia, relying on a single centralized instance becomes problematic. A user far from the server experiences longer response times, which negatively impacts their experience.

The solution is to duplicate the service across the various targeted geographic regions. Asian customers communicate with the instance in Asia, and American customers with the one in the United States. Beyond technical performance, this solution also simplifies regulatory compliance by region.

However, this multiplication of instances raises a major challenge specific to globalized retail: the scalability of identity management. By default, these regional instances operate independently and do not communicate with each other. What happens when a customer travels? This is a critical issue for luxury brands like LVMH or airport retailers (Duty Free). A customer account created in France, along with its purchase history, must be recognized by the system in a boutique of the same brand in the United States.

To solve this puzzle, Purse designed the ICE (International Consumer Experience) feature. It allows for precise configuration of which user data should be synchronized between different global instances, and when. The brand can specifically choose which profile attributes to duplicate, excluding those relevant only to a local market. This synchronization covers all basic operations (creation, update, deletion), ensuring that a customer retains their entire relationship context, no matter where in the world they interact with the brand. For Purse, two challenges are combined: implementing the scalability architecture, and then creating the link between instances to keep data consolidated.

Recognizing the customer from one region to another thus becomes a lever for relationship-building and loyalty.

CRM/CDP integration: placing CIAM at the heart of the data ecosystem

CIAM is just one building block within a complex ecosystem. Collecting data is the first step. Sharing this set of qualified information with the rest of the brand's ecosystem multiplies its value.

The ultimate goal for major brands is to build a "Golden Record," a 360-degree view of every individual. This view brings together everything the brand knows about a customer: their purchases, average basket size, preferences, and interactions with customer service. Purse Identity contributes to this by collecting first-party data—data gathered directly from the customer. This data has the advantage of being qualified at the source. To build this view, the brand relies on other components beyond CIAM. Two generally stand out:
CRM (Customer Relationship Management), which manages the customer relationship: support, after-sales service, loyalty, and communication;
CDP (Customer Data Platform), which aggregates data from all the tools the brand uses to reconstruct a complete profile for each customer.
Depending on its architectural choices, a brand can feed its CDP with the many identity attributes that Purse Identity collects.
For these solutions to exchange data fluidly, APIs are the standard for communication. When a user browses your e-commerce site and logs in, the platform calls Purse's APIs to execute the authentication flows. Once this highly qualified data is captured, it must then be transmitted to your other tools.
Beyond this layer, some integrations are pre-packaged as connectors. A connector prepares the ground between two solutions and reduces configuration work for the brand. This keeps the integration flexible and adaptable to each company's specific context.

Whether through packaged connectors or standard API exchanges, the essential point is that your CIAM should never be a silo, but rather the engine of your customer data strategy. That is the whole purpose of a well-integrated CIAM: connecting brands and customers in a single touchpoint.

CIAM Architecture: A Scalable Customer Identity Foundation

For CIOs, choosing an identity management solution is no longer just about selecting a login tool. It is a structural investment. It means anticipating three questions that will arise sooner or later:

• Will it hold up during my peak activity periods?
  
• Will it keep up with me if I expand internationally?
• Will my customer data flow throughout my ecosystem?

A cloud-native CIAM architecture designed for scalability addresses these three challenges while leaving the management of technical complexity to the provider. The brand can thus evolve its setup at the pace of its growth, rather than rebuilding it at every new stage. Evaluating your identity architecture against these three questions means giving yourself the means to grow without having to rebuild everything.