Understanding the Importance of Open Source Identity and Access Management

If it is about meeting the complex demands of core Identity and Access Management requirements of a present-day organization, a significant part of these can be effectively met by Open-source software. No wonder businesses rely on access management, identity management, Single Sign-On, and authorization for ensuring corporate security.

Identity Management and Access Management are not referred as separate entities. However, these are quite different from each other. In fact, both are known to have their own rules and individual best practices.

What is Identity Management?

It includes a set of tools and practices. These promises effective maintenance of consistency in identity data and synchronization across varied models, data formats, and repositories.

Understanding Access Management

Access management is a web of systems, technologies, and systems supporting user authentication. This indicates the process allowing users to access a given system. Another primary element of access management is authorization. This allows a specific set of abilities to each user on a system.

Why IAM?

These days, identity and access management have emerged as a crucial part of an organization. This is very important in an age when hackers are getting smarter than programmers. Regardless of the complexity used, none of the passwords are safe. In fact, hackers can get through these in minutes! No wonder corporate data breaches have become a common occurrence, these days.

The World Wide Web is predominantly ruled by these dangerous cyber criminals. In fact, these people have gained success in infiltrating several large-scale and government enterprise systems. In fact, it is easy to enter into a corporate network! All it requires is a hacked set of authorization.

This is also the reason organizations are facing heavy security challenge. Hence, it is crucial to go beyond passwords to include all facets of identity and access control. Identity and access management can help.

It includes all mandatory technologies and processes that will facilitate accurate and efficient delivery of secure access to ONLY authorized users to the systems, data, and applications from any device, at any time.

IAM can also be defined as the ability to understand the entire IT infrastructure and get a detailed look at which includes the following listed below:

• Who gets access to what
• The cloud
• Know where non-compliance and security risks exist (user accessible)
• What they are allowed to do using that access
• Whether or not it is appropriate to their existing / future association with the corporation

On the other hand, there’s much more to IAM than the points listed above! It is possible to streamline user onboarding and off-boarding and their access to the system and applications organization with a change of relationship status with the help of using Enterprise Identity Management. Correct implementation of IAM will ensure elimination of commonplace phenomena, including the following:

• Missing audit logs
• Privilege creep
• Inadequate audit logs
• Privilege escalation attacks
• Password confusion
• Usual identity confusion

All you need is to ensure right installation of IAM and it can effectively facilitate enterprises to assuredly deliver 100% secure access without any boundaries.

These days, reputed and established IAM solution providers can customize services to meet certain requirements for new developments. Some of these include the following:

• User provisioning based on roles and permissions such as permission matrix driven provisioning combined with access to systems
• User self-service functions such as user registration, password reset, etc.
• Scripted SQL connector development for aggregating data from diverse systems of record, including Banner, AS400, or other HR systems.
• Custom UI screens development in open source HTML, CSS, JavaScript frameworks such as Angular JS or Bootstrap etc.
• Developing Activity workflows to implement existing business processes that are not covered by in-house BPM systems.
• Cloud connectors for syncing data to and from Google, and Office 365