An Interview With Jen Schreiber - CIAM Weekly

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An Interview With Jen Schreiber<br>Nov 24, 2025

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Heya,<br>This is another in my series of interviews about the future of CIAM from experts in the space.<br>Jen Schreiber is a skilled software engineer specializing in digital identity for large-scale systems. She is driven by a single mission: to make the digital world more secure, interoperable, and accessible for everyone. Jen is an active participant in the identity community, contributing to specifications within the OpenID Foundation and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and sharing her expertise by speaking at industry events.<br>She was most recently recognized as a 2025 Women in IT Security Honoree and with the 2024 Vittorio Bertocci Award for her contributions to the field. Jen believes the future of security is directly linked to the diversity of the people building it. As a former Area Director for Women Who Code in Colorado, she built networks and inspired women to pursue and excel in technology careers.<br>I’m excited to hear Jen’s views on CIAM, identity and more.

Dan: What problems do you see customer identity and access management (CIAM) solving for your customers?<br>Jen: For me, the biggest problem CIAM solves, and maybe the biggest opportunity, is bridging the knowledge gap between security best practices and the actual end user.<br>Our users, and our customers’ users, might know nothing about cybersecurity, or they may be security experts. As CIAM professionals, we have no idea of their security background. But we are asking them to make crucial security decisions every day, from verifying their identity to performing tasks within an application.<br>CIAM’s high impact is that we get to guide them toward the right decisions. Our job is to make the right decision the easiest decision for the user. That means making the secure path the default path while making the insecure decision clunky and annoying. This is how we achieve security fundamentally by design.<br>Whether that is transparently requiring MFA, implementing just-in-time access for an elevated task, or expiring a session to prevent session hijacking, we are constantly protecting a huge surface area and leading the user to make wise choices without them even realizing it.<br>Dan: What are major challenges you see with CIAM (in the industry, in implementation, etc)?<br>Jen: When it comes to challenges, I think about how much more complex and distributed our environments have become. We are now stitching together identities across dozens of systems, APIs, and third-party services, each with its own risks and expectations.<br>Greater complexity means a wider attack surface. The real challenge is not just defense; it is building systems that can detect, decide, and respond at speed.<br>Dan: What excites you about the future of CIAM? Any predictions?<br>Jen: This one is easy and continues the conversation from above. It is the shift from static, point-in-time security to continuous, real-time access evaluation and automated response.<br>I am excited about putting all the pieces of the CIAM ecosystem together. In the past, we have relied on a basic, static identity flow: provision a user, enable single sign-on, and grant access. But this is not enough anymore. The increasing system complexity, the scope of the internet, and what users, and especially AI agents acting on their behalf, can access have required a shift in our model of who the user is and what they can do at any point in time.<br>This is why I see standards like the Shared Signals Framework (SSF), which I contribute to, as both important and full of potential. The core effort is to share security event information and enable faster cybersecurity response.<br>How cool does this future sound: a fully secure, end-to-end flow for the enterprise. It moves from initially provisioning a user and enabling single sign-on, to instantly receiving an SSF signal, and finally, reliably revoking access in real time.<br>That is the power and potential that truly excites me.

Thanks again to Jen for sharing her views.<br>Dan

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