What Are The Pillars of IAM?

IAM encompasses technology, people, and processes for creation, authentication, controlling, management, and setting privileges for different employees.

But to implement a successful IAM solution, it is essential to have a proper understanding and foundational concept of how IAM works & what are the pillars that make an IAM robust.

Now, let’s discuss all the different pillars of IAM.

5 Key Pillars of Identity and Access Management:

Pillars are the factors on which an IAM and its adequate operation will depend.

To provide a seamless identity & authentication with robust security, all IAM solutions must reside upon these particular pillars listed below.

#1. Seamless Employee Identification and Authentication:

Almost all IAM solutions come with different authentication mechanisms like beyond password-based authentication like social login, OTP-based login, adaptive authentication, biometric authentication, etc., to provide seamless login and employee identification.

All of these provide smooth authentication to employees without any hurdle to remembering passwords and changing them again.

Login through user’s digital identity with proper security and management is the first key pillar of leveraging a successful IAM solution.

#2. Compliance and Privacy:

Another significant factor for making IAM solutions so robust is the appropriate governance of privacy & latest compliance.

Digital privacy and compliance are the foundation of protecting an individual’s digital identity and assets.

All IAMs adhere to the latest compliance (like GDPR, HIPAA, COPPA, etc.) update and keeps the organization aligned with the latest standards and policies associated with privacy.

The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) explicitly focuses on personal data protection and private data protection rights for each individual.

All IAM should run on this principle.

Thus, it makes privacy and compliance the second pillar of IAM.

#3. High Availability and Scalability:

All IAM customers expect their security service to stay alive 24×7.

Most workforce IAMs used in an organization can expect thousands of users to authenticate and login with their digital identities and login credentials.

Some users might log in remotely, while others will log in in-house.

To manage this spontaneous process of authenticating, IAMs should remain available always, with their security postures and prevention mechanisms in place.

In case the organization wants to expand its authentication service to more employees, IAMs should leverage the cloud features for scaling without performance degradation.

#4. Robust Encryption:

Encryption is another pillar of IAM that takes care of the employee’s digital identity and other data at rest or in transit.

Data residing in the cloud or on-premise servers is the data at rest.

Employee data that helps in authentication need to communicate with different databases is the data in transit.

Encryption helps in protecting identity data and communication irrespective of where they reside.

All IAMs should provide holistic security for diverse forms of data through encryption.

#5. Authentication and Threat Analytics:

The last but effective pillar of IAM is analytics.

By leveraging the IAM solution, CISOs and security professionals of the organizations can effectively monitor the authentication and authorization of the different employees.

Modern IAM solutions also come with data analytics and reports in their dashboards that can help render insights on various threats, employee profiles, privileges, fraud detection, risk-based authentications, and other valuable insights.

Real-time analysis and predictive analysis in IAM can help identify threats dynamically and predict future events and attacks so that the organization can minimize or eradicate them without much damage.

Conclusion:

We hope this blog has given you a crisp idea of the different pillars and their characteristic features.

Organizations that implement IAM must consider enabling these five pillars to take complete benefit of any IAM product.

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