What is Identity Management?

Home Identity Management (IdM) System What is Identity Management?

At a very high level, Identity Managment (IdM), sometimes called Identity and Access Management (IAM) is about managing people's accounts: making sure people have the accounts (and permissions) they need and that they don't have access they shouldn't have.

A more formal definition is:

...the identification of authorized users...to facilitate business activities such as physical access control, information systems access control, and workflow automation in accordance with business policies...

The focus on business process and access control strongly influences the kinds of information that an Identity Management system typically provides. Ideally, accounts can all be traced back to the individual that they belong to, and the record of the individual includes information on all of their accounts. This compares to a less organized system where frequently it is difficult to determine whether the user "Jim Doe" on one system is the same person as "James Doe" on a separate system.

Elements of Identity Managment

In a broad sense, Identity Management processes can be broken into four categories:

• Account Management: Tracking what accounts, resources, services and roles an individual should have access to.
• Provisioning: Creating, updating and closing accounts natively in external systems.
• Authentication: Verifying the identity of an individual (i.e., handling logins)
• Profile Management: Managing status, authorization and entitlement information, as well as general "directory" information.