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Identity & Access Management

Identity & Access Management

Summary

Centralized identity, authentication, authorization, and federation for users and services.

What it is

IAM provides digital identity lifecycle, authn/z, federation, and policy enforcement for humans and workloads across the estate.

Responsibilities

  • Identity lifecycle (provisioning, deprovisioning)
  • Authentication (MFA, risk-based)
  • Authorization (RBAC, ABAC, PBAC)
  • Federation (OIDC/SAML) and secrets/PKI

Core capabilities

  • Policy as code and centralized auditing
  • Service-to-service identity (mTLS, SPIFFE/SPIRE)
  • Just-in-time and just-enough access
  • Zero trust posture and session management

Architecture patterns

  • Token-based auth (JWT, OAuth2)
  • Attribute and policy-based access control
  • Federated identity across SaaS and on-prem
  • Workload identity with short-lived creds

Tech examples

  • WSO2 Identity Server
  • WSO2 IAM SaaS solution Asgardeo
  • Keycloak
  • Auth0
  • Azure AD
  • Okta
  • SPIRE

KPIs/SLIs

  • Auth success rate and latency
  • Policy evaluation latency
  • Credential compromise and rotation compliance
  • Access request lead time