Identity and Access Management

What is Identity and Access Management?

Identity and access management (IAM) ensures that the right people (identity) can access the right resources at the right times, for the right reasons (access management).

IAM processes and technologies make it easier for organizations to manage identities and control user access at granular levels. These systems also help organizations comply with rapidly changing regulations about how confidential information, such as medical and financial records, are stored and accessed.

In today’s digital-first world, the importance of an effective IAM strategy cannot be overstated. By falling short on IAM best practices, organizations unknowingly risk their own security, along with that of their customers and shareholders. Common mistakes include:

• Home-grown proprietary identity solutions: Organizations often build customer-facing applications on a department-by-department or product basis. While these applications work well initially, problems arise when home-grown solutions can no longer operate independently.
  
  
• Multiple end-user repositories: Whether it be a merger or successful pilot application, IT teams build multiple repositories for any number of reasons. However, having data siloed in different repositories creates significant challenges.
  
  
• Lack of consistent authentication: When multiple applications handle user authentication separately, users face different authentication processes for each one. Lack of a consistent authentication measure like single sign-on (SSO) creates cumbersome logins and increases attack vectors.
  
  
• Application-based authorization or account-based access control solutions: Managing multiple sets of access policies across different applications is complex and time-consuming. Similarly, account-based access controls are difficult to manage at scale.
  
  
• Manual customer consents: Custom-built systems for managing online consents quickly become outdated. Blanket consents are now ineffective because a single consent has evolved into multiple specific consents, rendering manual processes highly inefficient.

How does IAM Work?

IAM plays a crucial role in safeguarding organizations by securely verifying user identities and managing access rights. Modern IAM solutions typically serve two primary functions:

1. Authentication: Verifies the identities of users, applications, or devices by matching their credentials against a secure database, ensuring only verified identities gain access.
   
2. Authorization: Determines specific access levels for users, allowing finely-tuned, secure access to the resources they need without exposing entire platforms to potential risk.

In addition to these core functions, today's advanced IAM platforms offer essential features to streamline and strengthen identity management:

• Identity Management: IAM solutions serve as a centralized directory, managing user identities seamlessly from creation to deletion, or synchronizing with other identity sources when needed. These systems can also create unique identities for special access needs.
  
  
• User Provisioning : With role-based access control (RBAC), IAM solutions assign permissions based on roles tied to job functions, automatically granting or removing access to relevant resources as roles change.
  
  
• System Reporting: IAM tools provide actionable insights by generating detailed reports on critical activities, like login attempts or multi-factor authentication (MFA) usage, enabling organizations to reinforce compliance and proactively address security risks.
  
  
• Single Sign-on (SSO): A fundamental feature of modern IAM, SSO allows users to log in once and gain access to multiple applications, eliminating the hassle of juggling passwords and boosting productivity.

With these capabilities, IAM platforms deliver robust security while simplifying access management, empowering organizations to adapt and innovate confidently in a digital-first world.

Why IAM is Important

Business leaders and IT departments are under increased regulatory and organizational pressure to protect access to corporate resources. Common challenges that organizations face include:

• High-friction registration and access: Friction kills customer relationships. People are tired of creating and managing all of their user ID and password combinations and often abandon transactions due to high-friction registration and sign-on experiences. First impressions are important. If users have personalized, welcoming registration and sign-on experiences, they're much more likely to be interested in learning about the business. Engaging them at the appropriate time in the appropriate manner without overburdening them with questions makes them feel comfortable, and allowing them to authenticate in the ways most natural to them increases the chances of them returning to the site. Offering passwordless authentication options can also reduce the need for password resets and account lockouts and save organizations time and money.
  
  
• Data breach threats: Keeping data secure and private isn't easy. Customers demand that the companies they do business with not only make their personal experiences enjoyable, but that those same companies keep their data safe from breaches and protect their privacy. They want to know how their personal information is secured and transmitted, and many say that they will stop doing business with a company that does not adequately secure their data or respect their privacy.
  
  
• Meeting regulatory and compliance needs: As a result of the growing list of breaches, violations of customer privacy, and increasing consumer dissatisfaction, there's been an explosion of regulations related to data security and privacy. With these regulations, organizations are held accountable for protecting their data. Outsourcing data collection and processing to third-party software as a service (SaaS) providers does not absolve organizations from responsibility if data breaches occur. They must know what data they collect and what data their SaaS vendors collect, where that data is stored, who can access it, how long it should be retained, and how to delete it if requested or ordered to do so.
  
  
• Modernizing legacy infrastructure: Merging modern IAM technology with existing legacy infrastructures isn't always easy. This new technology must seamlessly integrate with organizations' existing online resources while not seeming disjointed or misaligned with their brands. At the same time, many organizations are also in the process of migrating resources to the cloud. They have a mix of infrastructure platforms, such as legacy on-premise and private and public cloud environments, and are working to balance stability and change.

IAM Best Practices

IAM best practices are guidelines organizations follow to offer the strongest identity security possible. To meet these standards, certain criteria and technology should be at play:

• Centralized identity storage: All of the identities, such as partner identities, administrator identities, and customer identities, are all in the same store. Artificially partitioning them doesn't make sense because identities will often take on more than one role. For example, a partner might need to be an administrator and an end user at the same time. Having a single store ultimately results in better, more consistent user experiences and makes it easier to manage identities as their roles, and the organization's relationship with them, evolves over time.
  
  
• Self-registration: Marketing campaigns and digital collateral bring prospects to the organization's site where users are incentivized to self-register. They create new accounts, provide their contact information, and become more engaged with the company from then on. Allowing users to leverage existing identities and social logins to access sites improves their experience because they don't need to manage yet another identity.
  
  
• Personalization and progressive profiling: After a user has registered, most organizations gather additional information about the user as the relationship grows. This information is often related to user status and activities or to credit cards and shipping addresses when items are purchased. Note that it's important to gather information only when it's needed and only when it's clear how it will be used.
  
  
• Self-service profile management and user consent: Organizations that collect customer information need to be responsible stewards, which means that they only collect the information they need and securely store that information. They must be transparent as to what information they collect, how it will be used, and they need to get users' explicit consent to govern distribution and use of that information.
  
  
• Passwordless authentication: When most users attempt to access an application, it's often easier for them to provide their fingerprints or speak into microphones than it is to remember and keep track of passwords. Passwordless authentication is not only often preferred, it's more secure. All communications are encrypted, and in many cases, public-key cryptography techniques are used and private keys never leave users' devices, which lessens the chances of someone intercepting them during transmission.
  
  
• Contextual authentication: With contextual authentication, organizations can look at a variety of factors to better understand the risk when users attempt to authenticate. They determine whether the user has used the device before, if it's known as a risky IP address, the amount of time since the user last authenticated, and the geographical region to which the user belongs.
  

IAM Standards

To meet the complex use cases of modern enterprises, IAM platforms must integrate with a wide variety of systems - including cloud services, on-prem applications, and third-party APIs. As such, modern IAM systems follow certain standards to maximize functionality:

Security Access Markup Language (SAML): SAML is an open standard for exchanging authentication and authorization data between an IAM provider and an application. SAML allows users to log-in to third-party applications integrated with an IAM system - greatly expanding the interoperability of modern identity solutions.

OpenID Connect (OIDC): Like SAML, OIDC is an open standard for logging into third-party applications integrated with IAM solutions. While similar, SAML differs from OIDC since it is built on OAuth 2.0 standards and uses JSON instead of XML.

System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM): SCIM is a standard for automatically exchanging identity information between systems. SCIM complements both SAML and OIDC by ensuring user information is updated across third-party apps during provisioning, updates, and deletions.

What Additional Capabilities Come with Modern IAM Solutions?

Leading identity solution providers like Ping offer a plethora of extra capabilities with their IAM platforms. From cloud deployment to MFA, these modern additions are designed to enhance the user experience, while also bolstering security.

Multi-factor Authentication (MFA): MFA improves security during login by requiring an added credential such as a one-time password (OTP) delivered via text message or email. Due to MFA, bad actors generally cannot gain access to targeted resources - even if they have compromised login credentials in hand.

Cloud Deployment: Cloud deployment offers scalability and flexibility, allowing organizations to quickly adapt to changing compliance protocols, security threats, and user demands. Since they are easy to update, cloud-based IAM solutions have lower maintenance costs than on-prem systems, while still offering many more options for security upgrades.

Passwordless: Compromised login credentials pose one of the largest security threats to organizations today. With passwordless IAM, organizations use stronger authentication methods like mobile push authentication, QR codes, and FIDO-compliant authenticators to eliminate the inherent risks that come with poor password management.

Threat Protection: When integrated with an IAM solution, threat protection capabilities use dynamic risk predictors to learn and adapt throughout a user’s session. While threat protection technology stops bad actors, malware, and bots, it does so without adding unnecessary login friction for legitimate customers.