Identity Management

A digital identity is a collection of all the electronic data on an entity like a specific individual, an organization, or an electronic device. According to ISO/IEC 24760-1:2019, addressing the need to implement highly efficient and performing systems that make decisions based on identity requires a comprehensive framework for the use and processing of data. 

By having a digital identity, an individual can be represented by specific components of civil and personal identity that have been obtained from the widespread usage of the respective data in a reliable and trustworthy digital format in computer systems. 

The collected data allows for the accurate identification and authentication of an entity performing various transactions on the web, minus human supervision. 

Nowadays, more and more applications are requiring users to have their own corresponding digital identities since their personal data is increasingly being connected to their private or national identities. 

The collection of a user’s online activity, such as their search and purchase history over the internet, personal and private information like birthday, ID number, or driver’s license, along with their usernames and passwords, as long as they are available to the public, can easily be compounded by any interested party to establish the identity of the user. Generally speaking, a digital identity can be defined as a component or a determining factor that can be utilized to establish the identity of an individual. 

Therefore, digital identity is created by the organic usage of personal information performed on the internet and from the data shadow as a result of a person’s online activities.

Identity and access management (IAM), simply referred to as identity management, is a form of an access management system which is under the intertwined scope of information management and IT security. Its main objective is the supervision of access to authorized parties to maintain security in terms of systems and data management. Apart from identifying, authenticating, and managing access to IT resources for users, digital identity management systems are also in charge of controlling the hardware and applications needed to be accessed.

Crucial to an organization’s security architecture, digital identity and access management system aids in the verification of a person’s identity to make sure they are awarded the appropriate level of access to the data and systems of the workplace. It is quite common for identity management, authentication, and access control to be used interchangeably in some cases. However, they each relate to individual and specific areas of enterprise security applications.

As we move forward to an increasingly digital world, digital identity and access management solutions are being deployed in multiple industries and becoming more and more critical in observing regulatory requirements and processes such as KYC protocols for banks, telcos and other institutions.

Identity and access management tools are some of the surefire methods to safeguard network security, ensuring the seamless operations in fulfilling an organization’s network administration strategy.

With the right choice of tools such as IBM’s Security Identity and Access Assurance, Microsoft’s Azure Active Directory and Oracle’s Identity Cloud Service among many others, the management of access rights and privileges of authorized users in an organization can be effectively administered.   

The best digital identity management tools should satisfy these three components:

– Granting access only to authorized users.

– Allocating the appropriate rights and privileges to each user and ensuring nothing more can be accessed.

– Monitoring of issues that may arise when accessing an organization’s resources to make sure nothing untoward transpires.

Regardless of the use case or the industry, the best IAM solutions always let you manage the digital identities of your users, guaranteeing that each user has the appropriate access to the resources for their assigned tasks.

Digital identity management platforms should provide technical solutions and relevant policies that various organizations can implement in the management of user identities and the regulation of user access. It is vital to consider the main features of digital identity and access management solutions such as single sign-on (SSO), role-based account controls, user monitoring and compliance.

In the field of information technology, a federated identity can be defined as the method of connecting a user’s electronic identity and characteristics, which can be accessed from various identity management system databases.

Closely connected to single sign-on (SSO), a federated identity is crucial in ascertaining that the single authentication ticket, or token of a specific user can be authorized across various IT systems.

Federated identity management (FIdM) refers to the standardized set of policies, processes and protocols that are implemented for the management of trust and identity into IT users and devices being used in organizations.  

FIdM relates to the different applications and technologies which ensure that identity information can easily be transferred and moved throughout security domains that are often autonomous. The main point of identity federation is to make sure that every user of a distinct domain can safely access data or systems of another domain without any problems. There should also be no issues regarding totally repetitive user administration. 

Federated identity management is essentially a set of protocols that are designed to aid organizations and various applications to share user identities. Across several organizations, FIdM allows users to utilize the same identifiers to access services, systems and applications.