Identity & Access Management
In a recent study by Verizon, 63% of the confirmed data breaches are due to either weak, stolen, or default passwords used. There is a saying in the cybersecurity world that goes like this “No matter how good your chain is it’s only as strong as your weakest link.” and exactly hackers use the weakest links in the organization to infiltrate. They usually use phishing attacks to infiltrate an organization and if they get at least one person to fall for it, it’s a serious turn of events from thereon. They use the stolen credentials to plant back doors, install malware or exfiltrate confidential data, all of which will cause serious losses for an organization. And so Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a combination of policies and technologies that allows organizations to identify users and provide the right form of access as and when required. There has been a burst in the market with new applications, and the requirement for an organization to use these applications has increased drastically. The services and resources you want to access can be specified in IAM. IAM doesn’t provide any replica or backup. IAM can be used for many purposes such as, if one want’s to control access of individual and group access for your AWS resources. With IAM policies, managing permissions to your workforce and systems to ensure least-privilege permissions becomes easier. The AWS IAM is a global service.
Components of IAM
Users
Roles
Groups
Policies
With these new applications being created over the cloud, mobile and on-premise can hold sensitive and regulated information. It’s no longer acceptable and feasible to just create an Identity server and provide access based on the requests. In current times an organization should be able to track the flow of information and provide least privileged access as and when required, obviously with a large workforce and new applications being added every day it becomes quite difficult to do the same. So organizations specifically concentrate on managing identity and its access with the help of a few IAM tools. It’s quite obvious that it is very difficult for a single tool to manage everything but there are multiple IAM tools in the market that help the organizations with any of the few services given below.
Services By IAM
Identity management
Access management
Federation
RBAC/EM
Multi-Factor authentication
Access governance
Customer IAM
API Security
IDaaS – Identity as a service
Granular permissions
Privileged Identity management – PIM (PAM or PIM is the same)
