Identity and Access Management (IAM) FAQs

Identity and Access Management (IAM) FAQs

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Let’s discuss some popular Identity & Access Management FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) that organizations and individuals ask.

#1. What is The Use of Identity & Access Management (IAM) Solution?

Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions allow organizations to configure fine-grained access control across all the organizational services and resources.

It helps to secure the organization’s data, manage employee identity & access permissions to specific resources ensuring the least privileges.

#2. What is Least Privilege Permission?

The least privilege permission is an IAM policy’s approach that grants the needed permissions that are only required to perform a specific task by an employee.

The lesser privilege IT admins provide to an employee (through IAM), the lesser are the chances of getting an account compromise.

#3. What Does an IAM Framework Mostly Comprise?

The IAM framework mostly comprises three significant concepts like digital identity, authentication, and authorization.

All these collectively assure that the organization is catering to the right user with the right access for the right cause at the right time.

#4. What Can Organizations Do With Identity & Access Management Solutions?

With an Identity and Access Management solution, the organization or the IT security professional can set access control or create policies.

Through IAM, oranizations can determine what authentication techniques employees can leverage to provide secure authentication across various resources and devices within the system.

#5. Who Generally Handles Privileges & Policies for IAMs Within The Organization?

Usually, the system administrator, the security professional, or the security officer handles or controls access to systems, organization resources, and networks using the roles and privileges of individual users within the organization.

They also manage all employee identities through IAM, set privacy policies and authentication mechanisms, and limit unauthorized access through IAMs.

#6. Why Should an Organization Implement IAM Solution into Their Existing System?

Here is a list of reasons why organization should implement an IAM solution into their existing system:

  • It manages workforce identity and streamlines organization’s authentication workload
  • It enhances data security and privacy through encryption
  • It helps organizations to stay aligned with all latest regulatory compliance
  • It helps in managing employee access across devices and browsers
  • It allows administrators or IT security officers to set privileges and reduce human errors during authentication and authorization
  • It renders more effective access to resources

#7. What Are The Authentication Techniques That Most IAM Solutions Deliver?

Most IAM solutions come with various authentication techniques like password-based, passwordless, and federated SSO.

Some prevalent authentication techniques are biometric authentication, magic links, multi-factor authentication (MFA), one-time passcode, push notification, social login, phone login, etc.

#8. How Does IAM Help Organizations to Stay Aligned With The Latest Compliances?

Almost all IAM providers update their solutions with the latest compliance and adhere to the industry-standard policies so that organizations using their solutions do not have to pay additional attention to sticking to data privacy and regulatory compliance.

The list of some latest compliances are:

  • Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GBLA)
  • General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
  • California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA)
  • Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX)
  • Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
  • Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA)
  • Personal Data Protection Act 2012 (PDPA-2012)

#9. What Are The Benefits of Enabling Multi-factor Authentication For an Organization?

Security professionals of the organization can enable leveraging multi-factor authentication through the IAM solutions, so that employees can set an additional layer of security to their login or password changing process.

Multi-factor authentication adds an additional security layer to the authentication process.

Therefore, if the cyber-criminal steals the password or tries to gain access using the first authentication factor, they will not be able to gain access because of the other factors like biometric or OTPs, keeping employees account secure from unexpected threats.

#10. What Are The Names of Some Top IAM Providers?

Some popular IAM providers that organizations often prefer are:

  • Okta
  • OneLogin
  • Ping Identity
  • SailPoint
  • ForgeRock
  • CyberArk

#11. What is Access Management?

Access management deals with the management of employee’s identity access that determines whether an employee has the permission to access a particular resource.

In access management, we can set access policies and role-based access control (RBAC) to a specific group of people within the organization to access particular resources.

#12. What is Identity Governance? Is it a part of IAM?

Identity Governance (IG) is a part of the IAM service that explicitly takes care of policy-driven centralized orchestration.

It allows organizations to comply with new regulatory prerequisites such as GDPR, COPPA, HIPAA, SOX, etc.

Identity governance products and solutions enable organizations to enforce, audit, and review policies and check for compliance frameworks.

IAMs with identity governance allow organizations to stay aligned with all the identity management, regulations, identity intelligence, and role-based identity administration.

#13. What is The Concept of Bring Your Own Identity (BYOI)?

It is a concept used to determine the ability of an organization to support an identity that gets issued elsewhere.

Using those identities, employees can gain access to corporate resources and perform their day-to-day work.

With the help of identity and access management solutions, vendors and organizations can encourage employees & corporate partners to bring or use their own identity to access corporate resources.

#14. What is The Benefit of Federated Authentication?

There are various benefits of federated authentication over traditional authentication.

Some of them are:

  • It enhances security
  • Users do not have to remember passwords for every application or service they use
  • The speed of authentication increases
  • It renders a better user experience (UX) than traditional authentication techniques
  • It enables single-point provisioning that makes it easier to deliver users the accesses who are outside the traditional organization system
  • It also helps in sharing information & resources without risking any login credentials or organization’s data

#15. What Are The Best Practices for Leveraging IAM?

Here are some of the best practices for leveraging IAM solutions:

  • Enforcing multi-factor authentication makes account security more robust
  • Deactivate or remove orphaned accounts
  • Following the principles of least privilege access brings in more security
  • Automate the on-boarding process
  • Enable risk-based authentication feature
  • Enforce role-based access control (RBAC)

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