What is identity and access management? Guide to IAM

Identity and access management, or IAM, is a framework of business processes, policies and technologies that facilitates the management of digital identities. With an IAM framework in place, IT security teams can control user access to critical information within their organizations.

Using methods such as single sign-on (SSO), two-factor authentication and privileged access management, IAM technologies securely store identity and profile data and manage data governance functions to ensure that only necessary and relevant data is shared.

IAM performs the following fundamental security actions:

• Identifies individuals in a system through identity management and authentication.
• Identifies roles in a system and how roles are assigned to individuals.
• Adds, removes and updates individuals and their roles in a system.
• Assigns levels of access to individuals or groups of individuals.
• Protects sensitive data within the system and secures the system itself.

An enterprise's ability to know who is accessing which data and ...