IAM stands for Identity and Access Management defines and manages the role of access privileges of individual network users and the outcome in which the users are granted or denied those predetermined privileges. Those users could be employees (employee identity management) or customers (customer identity management). The objective of IAM is one digital identity per person. Once that identity has been established, now there is a need to maintain, modify and monitor throughout each user’s access lifecycle.
Hence, the primary goal of identity management is to provide access to the right enterprise assets to the right users in the right context, from a system of the user on boarding to permission authorizations to the off boarding of that particular user as needed. IAM systems offer the administrators with the necessary tools and technologies to change the role of the user, track his activities, create reports on those activities and encourage policies on an ongoing basis. These systems are designed in such a way to offer a means of administrating user access across the overall premises to guarantee compliance with government regulations and corporate policies.
What are the tools of IAM?
Identity and management technologies encompass password management tools, security policy enforcement applications, provisioning software, reporting and monitoring apps, and identity repositories. Identity management systems are readily available for on premises systems like Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Office 365 for cloud based systems.
Here are some of the IAM technologies with low maturity but high business value:
- API security
This enables the IAM for use with B2B commerce, micro services based IAM architectures, and integration with the cloud. API security solutions are used for SSO or single sign on between mobile apps or user managed access. This lets the security teams to manage IoT device authorization and personally identifiable data.
- Customer identity and access management (CIAM)
This lets comprehensive management and user authentication, integration with CRM, ERP and other CMS and databases, and self-service and profile management.
- Identity analytics (IA)
This will let the security teams detect and stop risky identity behaviors with the help of rules, machine learning and other statistical algorithms.
- Identity as a service (IDaaS)
This encompasses software as a service (SaaS) solutions that provide the SSO from a portal to web apps and native mobile apps and some level of user account provisioning and secure access management.
- Identity management and governance (IMG)
This offers automated and repeatable ways to govern the identity life cycle. This is deemed crucial when it comes to the terms with compliance with identity and privacy regulations.
- Risk-based authentication (RBA)
These provide solutions in the context of a user session and authentication to create a risk score. The company then can notify and prompt the high risk users for 2FA and lets the low risk users to authenticate with just a single factor. For instance, credentials like the username and password.
The IAM systems must be flexible and sturdy enough to fit in the complex nature of today’s digital world. Here is the reason why, a company’s computing environment used to be on a large scale on-premises and the IAM systems authenticated and tracked users when they are working inside the premises.