Enterprise Security Series Part 2 — Identity and Access Management
Welcome back. This is continuation to Enterprise Security Part 1 — Data Governance | by Krishna Avva | Feb, 2022 | Medium
Identity and access management (IAM) is a framework of business processes, policies and technologies that facilitates the management of digital identities — humans, devices and applications. At a fundamental level, the IAM defines how the users are identified in a system, what kind of access do they have, provisioning/de-provisioning of digital identities, securing the data in the system and lastly securing the system itself.
Cloud Hosting became popular because its more flexible, scalable, secure, cost-effective, and highly configurable. The biggest factor which contributed to these benefits was ‘multi-tenancy’. Multi-tenant architecture provides concurrent shared access of the 4 basic resources of a cloud — Compute, Networking, Storage and Database to more than 1 customer. With the growing regulatory and compliance laws, the business and technology leaders are more than ever dependent on IAM to protect them — in terms of data loss, data corruption, legal fines, access to enterprise resources etc.
The above diagram displays the basic building blocks of an IAM. It all starts with the ‘Identity Elements’ such as Identities, Groups etc used to define ‘Identity Patterns’ such as DIM, FIM etc on which ‘Identity Protocols’ are built such as oAuth 2.0. The Identity Elements, IAM Patterns and Protocols are all put together to design and implement IAM Cloud Solutions. For further reading i would strongly recommend “Identity and Access Management in Cloud Computing” by “Isuru J. Ranawaka” on 97 Things Every Cloud Engineer Should Know (redhat.com)
Following are the 8 guiding principles of Security Architecture on which we can build a secure enterprise and most of them are self-explanatory.
To conclude, IAM Solutions, Frameworks and design principles help enterprises meet industry compliance requirements, Privacy Laws, and help them save time and money while reducing the risk to the business units.
Further Reading:
What Is Identity and Access Management? Guide to IAM (techtarget.com)
How to ensure security for 3 types of digital identity (techtarget.com)
97 Things Every Cloud Engineer Should Know (redhat.com)
