Gone are the days when identity and access management were only security tools. Today identity management and access management (IAM) are assets that help businesses better serve their customers. The aim of IAM is to provide one digital identity per individual. Once that digital identity is established, it must be maintained and modified throughout the course of each user’s “access lifecycle”.

What you need to know about identity management software

Identity and access management is a security measure that enables the right individuals to access the right resources at the right times and for the right reasons. Identity Management helps companies organise users and set permissions. Single sign-on (SSO) and password management solutions are used to securely simplify access to various IT systems and applications. Multi-factor authentication tools and risk-based authentication tools help add an extra step to the verification process to boost security.

Benefits of identity management software

Implementing IAM, and the associated best practices, with a reliable partner can give a business a significant competitive advantage. Nowadays, most businesses need to give users outside the organisation access to internal systems. Opening your network to customers, partners, suppliers, contractors and, of course, employees can increase efficiency and lower operating costs.

Here are a few key benefits of IAM: 

1. Improve the security of your data: What’s the ultimate aim of IAM? To ensure that your sensitive company information doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. And the more When identity providers you have across different applications, the higher the risk of a breach. IAM solutions enable proactive security risk identification and mitigation
2. Improve end-user productivity: If you’ve ever forgotten your password, you’ll know how frustrating and time consuming it can be to get a new password and access your information. IAM mitigates this by minimising the need to remember and enter passwords and centralises the storage of employee information.
3. Speed up the onboarding process for new employees: By giving new hires a single identity it’s far easier for them to access all of the different business applications and platforms they need without having to get new login details. This also makes the granting or denying of employee access to specific applications and information far easier.
4. Reduce the risk of compliance failures: As regulators across the globe tighten the reigns on how businesses secure and use data, organisations need to get serious about being compliant. IAM systems offer the security needed to ensure compliance with corporate policies and government regulations.
5. Customise access privileges for users: There will always be certain bits and pieces of information that some members of staff can access, but others can’t. With IAM you can customise these privileges for each user this makes it easier to monitor user access, detect threats and prevent unapproved access.

What can identity management be used for?

API security enables IAM use with B2B commerce, integration with the cloud and micro services-based IAM architectures. Forrester sees API security solutions being used for single sign-on between mobile applications or user-managed access. This would allow security teams to manage IoT device authorisation and personally identifiable data.

Identity-as-a-service (IDaaS) encompasses cloud-based solutions that perform identity and access management (IAM) functions, like SSO. IaaS allows all users – from customers, employees to third parties – to securely access sensitive information both on and off-premises. IDaaS is about collecting intelligence that can be used to better understand, monitor and improve behaviour.

Identity analytics (IA) is described as the new face of IAM, Gartner calls Gartner IA aa risk-based approach for managing system identities and access. Identity analytics makes it possible for security teams to detect and stop risky identity behaviours using rules, machine learning and other statistical algorithms. IA replaces manual identity management processes, which are human-error-prone, and uses machine learning to expose any access anomalies and reduce risky actions.

Identity management and governance (IMG) provides automated and repeatable ways to govern the identity life cycle. This is important when it comes to compliance with identity and privacy regulations.

Risk-based authentication (RBA) solutions “take in the context of a user session and authentication and form a risk score. The firm can then prompt high-risk users for 2FA and allow low-risk users to authenticate with single factor (e.g., username plus password) credentials,”

What you should look for in IAM for the IoT

Businesses should ideally look out for IoT-ready “identity relationship management” (IRM), which should be scalable, flexible and high-performing while offering a single view of an entire IoT estate — whatever the level of sophistication.

If you need a little guidance on your IAM journey, we’re the perfect partner to help. Surge Identity is a cloud identity provider solution that enables secure sign in, using trusted identity and social providers and secures app-to-app communication using the latest industry security standards. To find out more, get in touch with us.