It’s never a good sign if anyone in the company is able to access any file whenever they please. Your company’s storage and file systems should be provisioned and locked down to certain access management credentials.

Identity and access management (IAM) is a critical aspect of information security that involves managing the identities of individuals and the access they have to an organization’s resources, systems, and applications.

Keep reading to get a better idea about what both identity and access are as well as why all of this is so important and what you could be doing to help your IT team run more efficiently.

What is identity?

It helps if you think about it in real-life terms. So, identity is actually all of the characteristics and attributes that make up a person. When it comes to IAM, identity is the digital representation of a person. Think of things like a username or email address. Both are unique to each member of the organization. Creating these user identities can help manage access to various resources — with both software (like file access) and physical (like keycard access).

What is access?

To help explain the concept of “access,” use keys as a metaphor. Think of access as the keys that open specific doors. So, if you give someone access to a certain department’s files, that’s like giving a key to the door that protects those files.

Giving someone access isn’t limited to just files, though. The same is true of networks or systems that each individual should have access to.

Additionally, access can include different levels or tiers. This is called access permissions. For instance, you might want one person to be able to open a file and another one to be able to edit it.

What are the components of IAM?

The basics of IAM can actually be separated into three categories:

  • Identity management. This is all of the things you need in order to create and manage accounts.
  • Access control. This is the technology used for managing access to resources and applications.

Authentication. Think of passwords or credentials. Private information that confirms a user’s identity. This is how they gain access to those systems and applications.

How does IAM work?

IAM works by establishing policies and procedures for controlling access to various systems and applications.

This includes creating and managing digital identities, defining access rights and permissions, and verifying the identity of individuals before granting access. IAM systems typically use a combination of technologies, such as firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and encryption, to secure access and protect sensitive information.

Why is IAM important?

These days almost every company is fully reliant on their computers and data. This only increases the need and importance of thorough and thoughtful identity and access management systems.

Creating a strategy for your IAM is critical because it helps you organize and protect sensitive information. After all, you are creating digital identities, but you’re likely pairing them with real people, your coworkers. Once you have identities created, then you’re able to control who has access to what. And in turn, this helps cut down the risk of unauthorized access, data breaches, and other security incidents.

Identity and access management is a crucial part of any enterprise environment. Here are a few reasons why that is:

  • Protects sensitive information: When you’re dealing with employees’ private information, you need to guarantee nothing will happen to it. IAM can help your company protect this sensitive data by controlling who has access to it.
  • Ensures compliance: Whether your company handles medical data, financial data, or just accepts credit card data, there might be special compliance policies you have to follow. IAM can help your organization comply with relevant laws and regulations.
  • Improves efficiency: By automating many of the manual processes involved in managing identities and access, IAM can help improve your team’s efficiency.
  • Maintains accountability: With the help of IAM, you can monitor and routinely audit the identities in your environment and their level of access to your environment.

Enhances user experience: IAM can make for a better user experience. Providing users with a single sign-on (SSO) gives them access to multiple resources, systems, and applications with just one username and password combination.

    Identity and access management benefits

    While the benefits of IAM are widely acknowledged in terms of security, compliance, and efficiency, there are several other benefits that are often overlooked. Let’s get into some of the lesser-thought-about benefits of IAM for your IT team.

    Improved collaboration

    By creating a centralized view of your company’s user access, IAM can help improve collaboration amongst your team. It’s a unifying data set that any IT member deploying a new server, system, or application will have to leverage.

    Simplified user management

    Another key benefit of IAM is that it offers a simplified user management solution. With IAM, your team can easily add or remove users, update permissions, and enforce access policies. By streamlining identities and access control, IT teams save time and resources. In turn, it allows them to focus on other more pressing tasks.

    Enhanced auditing and reporting

    With IAM in place, your team will collect different data about the business environment. It could become the ground for tracking access and activities of your users. It is the foundation for understanding how everyone works, what files they access, and when they do it. This information can possibly add to optimized performance, improved security, and more effective workflows.

    Increased scalability

    As your company grows, you’ll have more users and systems that need to be managed. IAM can provide scalable solutions to help your team support this growth. Allowing your company to be more agile while it scales and does so more efficiently and effectively.

    Cost savings

    Because IAM can ideally reduce the number of help desk calls your team receives, it can also lead to cost savings. If users are able to solve their own user and access management issues through a self-service portal, then that’s less demand on your team. And that’s not even getting into the true cost of security and preventing data breaches that can have a huge financial impact.

    In conclusion, IAM is a critical component of information security that involves managing the identities of individuals and the access they have to an organization’s resources, systems, and applications. By implementing IAM, organizations can reduce the risk of unauthorized access, data breaches, and other security incidents and ensure that they are in compliance with relevant laws and regulations.

    Hopefully, after reading this article, you have a better understanding about what IAM is and why it’s so important. Because much of your company revolves around its data, managing the users that have access to it and how much access they are granted is a priceless responsibility. Implementing an IAM in your organization won’t just bring you more security, but it will bring you more peace of mind too.