Identity and Access Management

Identity And Access Management

Identity management (IdM) describes the management of individual principals, their authentication, authorization, and privileges within or across system and enterprise boundaries with the goal of increasing security and productivity while decreasing cost, downtime and repetitive tasks.

"Identity Management" and "Access and Identity Management" (or AIM) are used interchangeably in the area of Identity access management while identity management itself falls under the umbrella of IT Security.

Identity management systems, products, applications and platforms manage identifying and ancillary data about entities that include individuals, computer-related hardware and applications.

Technologies, services and terms related to identity management include Active Directory, Service Providers, Identity Providers, Web Services, Access control, Digital Identities, Password Managers, Single Sign-on, Security Tokens, Security Token Services (STS), Workflows, OpenID, WS-Security, WS-Trust, SAML 2.0, OAuth and RBAC.

It covers issues such as how users are given an identity, the protection of that identity and the technologies supporting that protection (e.g., network protocols, digital certificates, passwords, etc.).