Identity Access Management Concepts

In this video, you will learn about some important concepts and definitions in identity and access management.

Once you have watched the video, take the concept of identifying and giving access further by reading the following:

Subjects

When we gave the example of somebody visiting your home, we said this was simple, conceptually. In practice, however, it is complex. For example, if you were controlling access to your home, and everybody from your organization visited over a period of time, would you be able to recognize them all to make an appropriate access decision? If you look at this on the scale of a government dealing with citizens, we could be talking about hundreds of millions of people, who may also have multiple digital identities.

Within a single system, these subjects could be individual people, but they could be processes. Subjects may not even be human beings; they could be an application represented by a process. So, this isn’t just about a person anymore. The challenge for cybersecurity practitioners is to be able to map complex information, or metadata, correctly against identities.

Reflect and share: IdAM needs to be comprehensive to support a myriad of requirements. What challenges can you identify that would need to be considered in order to plan and implement comprehensive IdAM? Share with your fellow learners.