Identity management overview

Consider the typical company. As an employee, there is likely several different systems you interact with on a regular basis. There is most probably time management software, file sharing services, HR, email, ERP, web, and any number of other services that you interact with on a regular basis. Each of these systems requires you to provide an identity so that it can authenticate it and authorize you to perform certain things.

The question of how to manage all of these identities is a very real concern. It would be near impossible for system administrators to manually create, maintain, and delete identities and their associated authorizations. To do so manually would also greatly increase the chance for an oversight or error. Identity management is therefore a broad term that describes how, and with what products, a company addresses this problem. The main goal of identity management (IdM) technology is to streamline the processes involved in creating, maintaining, deleting, and auditing user accounts and permissions across multiple systems.

There are several products associated with IdM, and I will take a more in depth look deserving it's own post for each. They are as follows:

• Directories
• Web access management
• Password management
• Legacy single sign-on
• Account management
• Profile update