I usually spend my mornings doing some reading and enjoying my coffee. On this one particular morning, I noticed that I had received an email from a gaming company I had created an account with around 10 years ago for my kids. They had sent me a code to confirm a login that was being done from Thailand. I had forgotten that I had even created the account. The account used a set of my credentials that had been compromised many years ago in one of the many data breaches that occur on a continuous basis. I was saved by a form of identity access management (IAM), and while I didn’t use the account anymore, I was thankful they had set this up.

But What Is IAM?

Identity access management is the process of verifying information to identify a user. This information is used to authenticate the identity of an individual, and in the process of authentication, the user is given authorized access and to perform certain tasks or to access information. Access management is about what networks, systems, applications, and data that the identified user can access and control.

Any identity access management solution should include the following:

  • How individuals are identified
  • How roles are identified and how they are assigned to users in a system
  • Adding, removing, and updating individuals and/or groups
  • Assigning levels of access for individuals and/or groups
  • Protecting the sensitive data and securing a system

Why Should You Use Identity Access Management?

In this continually evolving technological world, organizations have more data to protect in a variety of places such as on-premises, the cloud, mobile devices, legacy applications, etc. The normal boundaries that were used to protect data are disappearing rapidly. This has created massive challenges for organizations that want to control data access (Read more...)