What is Identity and Access Management?

IAM is made up of the following key elements:

• Identity

• Access

• Management

To understand IAM better, let’s break down its meaning word-by-word.

• Identity refers to the digital representation of an individual, whether an employee, contractor, vendor, customer, or any user interacting with an organization's systems.

• Access refers to the permissions and privileges granted to individuals based on their identity. It involves allowing or denying users the ability to use specific resources, such as systems, applications, or data.

• Management involves the systematic control and administration of digital identities and their associated access rights throughout their lifecycle.

IAM is about ensuring that the right people have the right access to the right resources while maintaining security, compliance, and efficiency. IAM involves processes like user authentication, authorization, and the enforcement of security policies. IAM solutions help organizations of all sizes implement a zero trust framework to manage and secure digital identities, control access to information, and monitor user activities for improved overall security and compliance.

Organizations have many users and many resources (applications, files, data, etc.) to manage, and different users need different access levels to resources based on their roles and responsibilities.

Access levels must be continually adjusted across multiple devices and various locations to keep pace with changing user roles and responsibilities. It’s a lot to think about all at once.

Robust IAM allows organizations to securely and effectively manage users' digital identities and related access privileges. With IAM, defenders can set up and modify user roles, track, and report on user activity, and enforce corporate and regulatory compliance policies to protect data security and privacy.

IAM is a critical component of a comprehensive security strategy, providing organizations with the tools and practices needed to manage identities, control access, and protect sensitive information in today's dynamic and interconnected digital landscape.

Identity management and access management are two closely related concepts within the broader field of identity and access management (IAM). While they share common goals, they focus on different aspects of the user lifecycle and access control.

Here's a breakdown of the differences:

Identity management

Identity management primarily deals with the creation, maintenance, and deletion of digital identities. It is concerned with managing the identity information of users.

Identity management handles the entire lifecycle of a user, from onboarding to changes in roles and responsibilities to offboarding. This includes managing attributes associated with user identities, such as names, email addresses, roles, and other relevant information. Identity management often includes processes related to verifying and authenticating the identity of users.

Access management

Access management is concerned with controlling and regulating the access that users have to specific resources, systems, or data based on their identities. It is responsible for determining what resources and actions users are permitted to access based on their roles, permissions, or other attributes.

While identity management may handle initial user authentication, access management focuses on ongoing access control, ensuring that users are authorized for the duration of their session. Access management often includes single sign-on (SSO) functionality, allowing users to access multiple systems with a single set of credentials.

Establishing a secure and efficient framework for managing digital identities and controlling access to digital resources requires some up-front considerations. To help get the most of IAM in any organization, defenders should:

• Consider future IAM needs

• Check compatibility and compliance

• Manage the change

• Set and track key metrics

Consider future IAM needs

IAM solutions with basic capabilities can be easily set up "out of the box." But if the organization is large and complex — or soon will be — it might demand a more advanced solution or a combination of systems and tools.

Check compatibility and compliance

Confirm that your IAM solution is compatible with all operating systems and applications, and cloud services in use. Create a list of all the systems impacted by the IAM platform, so that nothing is overlooked. Confirm that the chosen IAM solution complies with all statutory and regulatory requirements. Remember: an IAM solution should enhance compliance — not introduce more risk.

Manage the change

Many organizations take a phased approach to IAM adoption. Rolling out a new IAM solution to select areas of the business first helps surface challenges and sticking points that can be addressed before implementing the platform across the entire organization. IAM impacts everyone and everything that needs access to company resources. Getting buy-in from all key stakeholders is vital to a successful implementation.

Set and track key metrics

Tracking key metrics is a requirement for determining both IAM effectiveness and return on investment. Some important measures to log and report include new user provisioning times, the increase or decrease in password resets, and the frequency of policy violations.

IAM provides a proven framework for managing digital identities and controlling access to systems, applications, and data. Defenders rely on IAM to deliver:

Granular access controls

With IAM, organizations can allow or block access to protected data and applications based on specific, customizable conditions. Admins may set permissions based on time of day or user location to fine tune the control of when, where, and how digital assets can be viewed, shared, or used.

Development platform restrictions

IAM allows customized limits on access to AppDev environments, providing robust protection of assets used for development, staging, and testing of applications and web-based products and services.

Advanced data controls

Administrators can set strict, role-based user permissions to limit the creation, manipulation, transmission, and deletion of corporate data depending on need and asset criticality.

Detailed reporting

Telemetry from IAM platforms not only demonstrates compliance with security and privacy policies, but such insights also give organizations visibility into user behaviors and workflows that can be used to streamline processes and further reduce risk.

Implementing IAM helps enterprises bolster security posture, improve operational efficiency, ensure regulatory compliance, and provide better user experience. Thoughtful application of a robust IAM solution offers:

• Enhanced IT security

• Stronger compliance

• Higher employee productivity

• Reduced IT costs

Enhanced IT security

Apply the same security policies across the enterprise, restricting which users can access resources and when. This reduces the chance that unauthorized entities will see — or accidentally or intentionally misuse — sensitive data. Methods like single sign-on (SSO) and multi-factor authentication (MFA) also reduce the risk that user credentials will be compromised or abused, as users don't need to create and keep track of multiple passwords.

Stronger compliance

Meet the requirements of many compliance mandates related to data security and privacy. For example, IAM can help organizations reach Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) compliance.

Higher employee productivity

With security measures like SSO, MFA, or Role-based Access Control (RBAC), you can enhance security while also reducing barriers that prevent workers from being productive. Employees get fast access to the resources they need to do their jobs from wherever they need to work. With IAM, employees can feel more confident they are working in a secure environment.

Reduced IT costs

Automate and standardize many tasks related to identity, authentication, and authorization management. That means IT administrators can devote their time to more value-added tasks for the business. Additionally, many IAM services are now cloud-based, so the need to purchase, implement, and maintain on-premises infrastructure for IAM can be reduced or eliminated.

The core components of IAM encompass various functionalities including:

• Multi-factor authentication (MFA)

• Single Sign-On (SSO)

• Federation

• Role-based Access Control (RBAC) and zero trust

Multi-factor authentication (MFA)

With MFA, users are asked to provide a combination of authentication factors to verify their identities. In addition to usernames and passwords, many organizations commonly use the time-based one-time password (TOTP) method, which requires users to provide a temporary passcode that has been sent via SMS, phone call, or email.

Single sign-on (SSO)

SSO allows an authorized user to securely log in to multiple SaaS applications and websites using only one set of credentials (username and password). SSO systems authenticate users with MFA and then, using software tokens, share that authentication with multiple applications. SSO can also be used to prevent access to designated assets or locations, such as outside websites and platforms.

The upside of using the SSO approach for IAM, beyond creating a more seamless login process for end users, is that it gives IT administrators the ability to establish permissions, regulate user access, and provision and deprovision users with ease.

Federation

Federation enables SSO without passwords (passwordless authentication). Using a standard identity protocol, like Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) or WS-Federation, a federation server presents a token (identity data) to a system or application with which it has an established trust relationship. Because of that trust, users can then move freely between connected domains without having to reauthenticate.

RBAC and zero trust

Role-based access control (RBAC) is a method for restricting access to networks, sensitive data, and critical applications based on a person's role and responsibilities. Defined roles in RBAC may include end users, administrators, or third-party contractors. A role can be based on a user's authority, location, responsibility, or job competency. Sometimes roles are grouped together, so users with similar responsibilities in an organization who frequently collaborate can access the same assets.

By applying a zero trust security framework as part of RBAC, where very strict access controls are maintained with all users who request access to work assets, you can further prevent unauthorized access — and even contain breaches and reduce the risk of an attacker's lateral movement through the network.

Duo product leader, Josh Terry, highlights how Duo powered by Cisco Identity Intelligence will provide immediate security value and response to today’s most common attacks in real-time such as session hijacking, inactive account abuse, and more.