What is Identity and Access Management (IAM)?

Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a framework of policies, processes, and technologies that enable organizations to manage their digital identities and control user access to sensitive corporate information. It involves defining and controlling access rights, permissions and roles that allow authorized users to access systems in a secure manner. 

IAM is the most basic form of cyber security, that improves security and user experience, and enables better business outcomes. It increases the viability of mobile and remote working and cloud adoption. In the recent phase, IAM has become an essential strategy within an organization’s overall security efforts to protect the integrity and availability of data and devices from malicious attacks. But, the increase in the lapse of prioritizing effective identity and access management has given rise to cyber attacks that target the weakness. This includes recent ransomware attacks against casinos where attackers trick help desk team members to think they were employees who have lost their login credentials.

The compromised login credentials are the most targeted ones for the attackers to gain access into organization’s networks through malware, phishing, and ransomware attacks. Thus, it becomes important for the enterprises to secure their most valuable resources. Most of the companies are moving towards Identity and Access Management (IAM) to protect their data and people.

How Identity and Access Management (IAM) works?

The primary objective of an IAM platform is to assign one digital identity to each individual or a device. From here, the solution maintains, modifies and monitors access levels and privileges through each user’s access life cycle. IAM uses a general workflow that involves the following:

• User authentication- It is the process of matching a user’s digital identity to their personal identity to verify their identity. Authentication can be based on something the user knows (such as passwords), or has a token or smart card, or has biometric identification.
• User authorization- It is the process of allowing or disallowing access based on identity, role or privileges which can include predefined rules, policies or workflows.
• User provisioning and de-provisioning- It is the process of developing, updating and removing accounts and user access rights on multiple systems. Provisioning can be manual or automated and may involve approval workflows and auditing.
• User management- It is the process of maintaining and monitoring accounts and access rights, which includes resetting passwords, enforcing policies, revoking access, logging user activity and reporting on user behavior and compliance.

Composition of Identity and Access Management (IAM)

An IAM solution comprises of various components and systems which includes the following:

1. Single Sign-On: Single Sign-On (SSO) is a type of access control that allows users to authenticate with multiple software applications or systems using just a single login and one set of credentials. The applications or sites authenticated by the users relies on a trusted third party to verify that the user is who they claim and results in enhancing user experience, reduced password fatigue, simplified password management, minimized security risks for customers, partners and vendors, limited credential usage and improved identity protection.
2. Multi-Factor Authentication: Multi-Factor Authentication verifies a user’s identity with requirements to enter multiple credentials and provide various factors such as- something the user knows (like password), something the user has (like a token or code sent to user through email or SMS, to a hardware token generator, or to an authenticator application installed on the user’s smartphone), or something specific to the user (like biometric information).
3. Risk-Based Authentication: When a user tries to log in to an application, a risk-based authentication solution looks at contextual features such as their current device, IP address, location or network to analyze the risk level. On the basis of this analysis, the user will decide to allow access to the application, prompt them to submit an additional authentication factor, or disallow them from access. This, in turn, helps the businesses to identify significant security risks, gain deeper insight into user context and enhance security with additional authentication factors.
4. Privileged Access Management: Privileged Access Management secures business from both cyber and insider attacks by allowing higher permission levels to accounts with access to sensitive corporate resources and administrator level controls. These accounts are the most targeted ones for cyber criminals and are at high risk for organizations.
5. Data Governance: Data Governance is the process that allows businesses to manage the availability, integrity, security and usability of their data. This involves the use of data policies and standards around data usage to ensure that data is consistent, trustworthy, and does not get misused. This is as significant within an IAM solution as artificial intelligence and machine learning tools depend on businesses having quality data.
6. Zero- Trust: A Zero-Trust method keeps businesses away from the traditional idea of trusting everyone or everything that is connected to a network or behind a firewall. This approach is no longer acceptable or given adoption of cloud and mobile devices flourishing the workplace beyond the four walls of the office and enabling people to work from any place. Here, IAM plays a crucial role to allow businesses to constantly assess and verify the people accessing their resources.
7. Federated Identity Management: Federated Identity management is an authentication sharing process where businesses share their digital identities with trusted partners. This allows the users to use the services of multiple partners having the same account or credentials. Single sign-on is an example of this process.

Benefits of Identity & Access Management (IAM)

IAM is very important for security and compliance, identity and access management solutions. Along with this, IAM provides specific benefits to support other sensitive business initiatives around improving costs, complexity and agility. Below we have discussed some of the benefits of IAM:

• Reducing complexity- IAM can help to simplify an organization’s IT infrastructure and operations by integrating different systems, such as cloud services, apps, databases and networks under a unified and centralized IAM framework. It provides a centralized and consistent approach to manage user and device lifecycles, provisioning access and enforcing policies and rules. IAM allows seamless and more secure user access to and from different devices, platforms, and locations.
• Perspective to reduce costs and increase productivity- IAM helps to manage configurations and access rights for multiple users, making it simple and time-saving, in developing organizations. IAM helps to reduce the administrative costs, risks and workload burdens which comes with managing user accounts manually. This approach allows the user to access rights to self-serve certain tasks, such as creating, updating, deleting, and resetting passwords, and through the use of automation for other common helpdesk requests.
• Enhancing agility- IAM enables an organization to get a deeper visibility and understanding of user behavior and activity by providing analytics, alerts, and reports to determine potential threats or security risks that may exist. IAM helps in faster and easier remediation, provisioning, management and governance of user accounts and access rights to address and prevent risks proactively, thus allowing businesses to quickly adapt to changing security demands.

Types of IAM tools and technologies

IAM systems can engage different types of tools and processes. Some of the common types of technologies that can compromise a comprehensive IAM strategy consists of:

• Federated identity management (FIM) technologies allows users to access systems from different domains or organizations using their existing credentials through a third-party identity provider (IdP). This issues and manages user identities and credentials, such as usernames, passwords, tokens or biometric features. An IdP can be an external service, including Google or Facebook, or an internal service such as Active Directory or Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP). An IdP communicates with a service provider, which makes use of the application or service the user wants to access, using standard protocols like SAML or OAuth. 
• Access management tools manage and monitor user access to systems, including granting or denying access, enforcing policies and rules, or logging and auditing user activities. Examples of access management tools are SSO, MFA, ABAC, RBAC or PAM.
• Identity governance and administration (IGA) systems define, execute and enforce the policies and standards for user identity and access management, such as who can access what, when and how. Examples of identity governance processes include identity lifecycle management, self-service, password management or UBA.
• Identity and access management solutions allow on-premises or cloud-based services, such as Software as a Service (SaaS), Identity as a Service (IDaaS), or Authentication as a Service, for managing digital identities and access rights of users and devices in an organization.

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