IAM 101 - Episode 2: What is Identity Management?

In this episode, we will discuss what is Identity Management? Why It is essential for any enterprise? How is Identity management implemented in an organization?

Any modern enterprise has a wide variety of digital resources. They include from legacy mainframe systems to modern web applications, databases, directories, document stores, and various operating systems. All stakeholders in that enterprise access these resources, including employees, contractors, customers, and partners, and various devices such as servers, network devices, firewalls, etc.. Modern enterprise makes managing secure access to resources a challenging task. These challenges are simplified by Identity Management. Identity Management is everything that deals with managing identities in the IT Infrastructure of an enterprise. The complex part of the answers takes the rest of this video. The central concept of identity management is usually a data record that contains a collection of data about a person. This concept has many names but the most common are persona, user record, and user identity. Identity usually holds the information that describes the real-world person such as the person’s given name and family name. In an organization, Identity is associated with an account or multiple accounts. Each account contains the technical information that relates to the operation of an information system for which the account is created. This includes the specification of the home directory, and a wide variety of permission information such as group and role membership, system resource limits, etc. User accounts may be centralized and unified, distributed and unaligned, or anywhere between these two extremes. But regardless of the architecture, the aim of identity management is the management of identity and associated accounts. Identity management software takes care of technical (IT) tasks that happen when a new employee joins a company when his responsibilities change, when he leaves the company, when a new contractor is enrolled, and so on. This is called "Identity Lifecycle": the set of events and tasks that make sure that every "identity" has what it needs. Identity management takes care of the "technical details" of the identity lifecycle such as creating accounts, assigning correct groups and permissions, setting and resetting passwords, and so on. The goal of identity management is to automate as much as possible therefore reducing operational costs and improving security.