TIAA has an industry leading CIAM platform with a best-of-breed ecosystem of vendor products and specialized bespoke components. The inorganic and rapid growth of the platform presented opportunities for re-imaging the platform with practices common to software engineering like configuration management, observability, continuous integration and deployment. Improving these practices has resulted in significant improvements in operational efficiency, resiliency and overall velocity by addressing challenges such as time and effort for product upgrades, long lead times for configuration changes, and limited awareness of the platform by business and technical partners and stakeholders.

We are in a transformational journey for the platform including aspects such as containerizing our tools, migrating those tools from our datacenter to our self-managed cloud, keeping tool configurations in source control, and deploying configuration changes via CI/CD pipelines. Along the way we have worked to align Infrastructure, Architectural, Application Development and Business organizations using a unified CIAM capability model and Taxonomy. The result has been a platform that is better understood by our stakeholders, easier to maintain, and much quicker to deliver for our stakeholders.