What is Identity Management (IDM)?

Identity management (IDM) is the process of managing digital identities within an organization. As the first piece of the broader field of Identity and Access Management (IAM), identity management is focused on identifying human and machine identities, prior to their gaining access to relevant organizational resources. Using unique identifiers stored in a database, Identity Management systems ensure an entity is who you expect them to be.

Identity Management systems include features that enable organizations to manage identities, such as the creation, maintenance, monitoring, and deletion of identities. Depending on the solution, IDM and IAM systems may be separate, while some providers group both systems together in a singular overarching IAM system.

Identity Management systems typically assign a unique ID such as a username and control roles, permissions, and groups of users. These systems leverage passwords, and perhaps biometrics and/or multi-factor authentication to enhance security.

Identity management systems are vital to the protection of not just software and hardware – such as servers, hard drives, and networks – but also cloud services, workloads, and SaaS applications. IAM systems in particular raise alerts and alarms in response to unauthorized internal or external attempts to access systems.

Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) solutions ensure that all identities in an organization get the right access to the right resources. Organizations that support multiple user types and require complex admin-time controls often use IGA suites, offering the full range of capabilities associated with managing and governing identities in a hybrid architecture. Organizations with simpler needs choose light IGA solutions with a subset of IGA features to reduce cost and deployment time. Light IGA solutions often focus on identity administration features.

Diverse light IGA offerings are proliferating to automate access to identities. They support point solutions with partial functionality, such as employee life cycle management and provisioning to common systems, but lack capabilities for implementing compliance and automation. Organizations that choose light IGA solutions based on short-term needs may be successful initially with implementing basic identity administration, but due to gaps in governance capabilities, they may later struggle to meet the requirements of compliance audits.

To avoid such gaps in compliance, organizations should ensure that the chosen IGA platform meets their governance requirements, such as policy-based access orchestration and access control.

Typically these systems are managed by IT, within security or data management teams. The ecosystem of IDM tools and systems ranges from more traditional, “legacy” on-premises implementations to a growing number of cloud-based identity providers. IDM systems support devices such as phones, tablets, and desktops running iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, and Linux– as well as hybrid or multi-cloud environments, SaaS apps, ERP, EMR, and HCM platforms.

Typical IDM processes include managing admin authority, tracking and assigning roles and responsibilities, provisioning and de-provisioning of users, and password management. Changes to identities within an organizational database are traditionally made manually by a select few individuals. Today’s IDM solutions automate these legacy processes, streamlining traditional IDM workflows.