What is identity and access management (IAM)?

Identity and access management (IAM) is the ongoing process of managing, verifying, and securing access to an organization's IT resources based on internal roles and permissions. IAM authenticates users and determines if they're authorized to view certain files, folders, or databases within a given corporate environment. Meanwhile, IAM helps prevent hackers and other bad actors from accessing information they're not authorized to view.

Protecting backend systems is key, and safeguarding user accounts is also critical. Each internal account — even in a highly-secure environment — is a theoretical infiltration point. Through mechanisms such as password policies, regular auditing, and least-privilege access control, a comprehensive IAM strategy can prevent unwanted access while blunting social engineering practices. 

Enabling timely access is another tenet of identity and access management. Today's employees are distributed globally and often work remotely, making physical access impossible. While handling collaborative tasks across time zones, these individuals require secure access to emails, dashboards, databases, and other applications — without getting unexpectedly locked out. For this reason, IAM functions as a safety measure while enabling productivity across business units.

How did identity and access management (IAM) come about?

Identity and access management first arose as a formal concept in the early 2000s as digital identities first gained traction. Simple usernames and passwords had worked for some time as the main way to authenticate users, yet this came with security risks. 

Convenience often outweighed security, thus leading users to adopt weak passwords and (often) never change them, if possible. Organizations needed a more reliable, formally defined, and enforceable way to protect user accounts. 

With the rise of formal IAM solutions over the next decade, organizations steadily adopted tools such as Microsoft Active Directory (AD) to maintain access security as workforces grew larger. New regulatory demands also came into play. There wasn't just a privacy incentive to IAM — there was now a financial incentive to avoid any lost business opportunities and potential fines stemming from non-compliance. 

The 2010s cloud boom quickly introduced new hybrid cloud and multi-cloud networking patterns, making IAM tools indispensable. Securing access and communication across clouds became important as attack surfaces expanded. This new approach to IAM has only grown more important as companies adopt microservices architectures and Kubernetes.

How does identity and access management (IAM) work?

There are multiple elements of equal importance that comprise a well-rounded IAM approach: 

• Authentication – This process confirms that users are who they say they are. Authentication ensures that any entity — whether human or a bot — enters identifying information to the system such as account credentials or digital certificates. Biometric fingerprinting or retina scanning are other ways in which services can verify identity for human users. Authentication also includes measures such as two-factor authentication (2FA) or multi-factor authentication (MFA) that add layers (and thus confidence) to the overall process. Single sign-on (SSO) also simplifies this process by unifying logins across services, using a variety of approved providers. Technologies such as OpenID Connect (OIDC) make this even easier and more secure. 

• Authorization – While authentication is responsible for granting initial access, authorization dictates what users can access and where they can navigate internally. Just like the federal government issues varied security clearances according to position and rank, authorization checks a user account against a directory of roles, groups, and permissions to control levels of access. This can include a binary approved/denied response, or even more nuanced permissions handling (such as having commenter vs. editor privileges in Google Docs). Employees are typically given access according to the principle of least privilege. Internal users and groups can only access resources and workflows directly related to predetermined access criteria — without gaining deeper access to sensitive data. 

• Auditing – Largely a retrospective process, auditing takes a closer look at access logs, patterns, and client behavior throughout a session. While this can verify normal activity, it also helps administrators spot anomalies that signal malicious intent or abuse. Auditing is a constant effort that accounts for employee onboarding, offboarding, and role changes that dictate permissions handling. It ensures that former users can't access sensitive information while accounting for the fluid nature of least privilege, zero-trust access control. Accordingly, auditing is central to digital regulatory compliance and can have a highly-positive impact on security. 

Identity and access management relies on some components to work effectively. First, you need a database or permissions-management suite to continually track users, groups, and permissions as they evolve. The authentication service checks any access attempts against this database.

Administrators might also maintain a complex tree of permissions through a service such as Microsoft Entra ID — managed by a separate Entra ID server. Internally, your employees may be grouped into organizational units. These are typically composed of unique users, groups, machines, and volumes. Each of these units has its own unique access permissions and provides IT teams an easy way to manage everything.

Guarding against intrusion

IAM is key to protecting against unwanted access from external and internal parties. One such reason is social engineering, a practice that employs deception to trick users into sharing sensitive credentials — or outright steal them from unsuspecting targets. If you've ever received an email that sounded official yet came from an unverified sender, it's highly likely that sender was seeking access to something they're not authorized to view (such as banking info, business systems, healthcare records, etc.). 

Organizations must always remain vigilant and educate their employees to prevent these kinds of phishing attempts from succeeding. It's an important part of compliance, while recognizing that humans can be misled when such messages aren't treated with skepticism. 

Apart from phishing, organizations now manage a massive multi-cloud footprint. Companies manage and secure 364 SaaS applications on average, which continually exchange mountains of data during use. Because both stored data and transmitted data must be protected, many IAM providers include encryption measures to keep hackers at bay. Administrators can also conditionally restrict access to resources based on device type, IP location, application, and other configurable measures. And when a data breach occurs, attackers will struggle to actually decrypt that data into a human-readable format.

What are the benefits of identity and access management (IAM)?

IAM offers many advantages for organizations of all sizes, including the following: 

• Thanks to practices such as zero trust, least-privilege, and role-based access control (RBAC), IAM ensures that certain users or groups don't obtain elevated access rights when they're unneeded. 

• Access-related automations make it easier to assign or change permissions without extensive human intervention. 

• IAM makes collaboration easier by not only locking down sensitive systems to relevant employees, but also by ensuring access is available, quick, and seamless. 

• Consolidated access solutions such as SSO make it easier to access systems uniformly while easing the burden of password management. 

• IAM makes access control more manageable in distributed computing environments, instead of relying on edge solutions catered to specific access patterns. 

• IAM-based encryption methods can help prevent or lessen the impacts of data breaches. 

• Improved access security and auditing means better adherence to compliance standards. 

• IAM makes password management inherently easier, reducing the amount of password policy-related tickets sent to IT administrators. 

• Fully-managed IAM solutions offload the bulk of management burden from internal teams — instead placing that responsibility onto the external vendors themselves. 

• IAM recognizes that global employees access systems at varying times and for varying reasons, enabling remote workers instead of falsely flagging behavior as suspicious.

Does HAProxy support identity and access management (IAM)?

Yes! HAProxy One — the world's fastest application delivery and security platform — facilitates streamlined IAM with support for Microsoft Active Directory (AD), Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS), Microsoft Entra ID, and our native OpenID Connect (OIDC) Module. 

HAProxy Fusion Control Plane delivers centralized management of load balancer privileges for users and groups via RBAC. Group policies into roles before assigning them to users, or delegate special superuser permissions as needed. HAProxy Fusion also enables you to add, edit, and remove users or policies with ease — while using precedence to resolve conflicts between combined policies. 

Learn how HAProxy Enterprise handles SAML-based single sign-on for your applications. Or request a demo of HAProxy One to see how it integrates with your existing IAM infrastructure.