Description

Identity and Access Management (IAM) Overview

Learn the key issues and concepts for adding identity and access management to your internal and external services.

Designing and implementing sign-in flows and access management ensures that the right person has access to the right services. Identity and Access Management (IAM) impacts your end users, customers, and employees and makes it easier to adapt to changing security needs. Even small issues with the design or implementation of IAM can cause reliability issues, or worse, expose a weakness in your security.

A key concept for using IAM is understanding who needs to access which services and their objectives. It's not always as simple as employees and customers as there may be different types of access, such as a user or an administrator. Designing and implementing IAM systems to meet your requirements can also require significant effort. Okta can reduce the time, effort, and risk.

What to Know About IAM

• IAM concepts: Introduces the Workforce and Customer Identity models for IAM solutions and summarizes the main features of an IAM solution
• IAM design example: Describes a typical Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) solution
• Design an IAM solution: Summarizes some key features of IAM solutions

Some topics require more information:

• Identity management factors: Focuses on identity storage, processing, and related administration design
• Authentication factors: Describes design considerations for authenticating users
• Authorization factors: Describes design considerations for defining what resources that a user can access
• Architectural factors: Describes important architectural requirements to consider for your solution and possible strategies for addressing them
• IAM terminology: Contains key definitions of common terms

IAM Concepts

IAM secures your services in two ways. First, it verifies the identity of a user when they sign in. Second, it lets a user access only the parts of your network and services that they have permission for.

For example, a customer may require only a username and password and has permission to view and buy items. While a vendor may require a one-time passcode and has permission to add and update items, but not buy them.

Features of an IAM Solution

You can divide the features of an IAM system into three areas: user experience, security, and infrastructure. The following sections illustrate the most important features in each area: