What is Identity and Access Management (IAM)?
Identity and Access Management (IAM) is the discipline of defining and controlling who can access which resources, under what conditions, and with what level of privilege. IAM covers identity governance, authentication, authorization, privileged access, and machine identity across on-premises and cloud environments.
What it does
IAM is the set of policies, processes, and tools that answer two questions: who are you, and what are you allowed to do? In practice, IAM products perform some combination of the following:
- Authenticate users and machines using passwords, MFA, passkeys, or certificates.
- Authorize access by enforcing role-based, attribute-based, or policy-based rules.
- Provision and deprovision accounts across applications when employees join, move, or leave.
- Govern identities by running access certifications and enforcing separation of duties.
- Manage privileged accounts by vaulting credentials, recording sessions, and rotating passwords.
- Control cloud entitlements by detecting over-permissioned roles across multi-cloud environments.
- Secure machine identities such as service accounts, API keys, and certificates.
IAM is a broad parent category. Sub-disciplines include Privileged Access Management (PAM), Identity Governance and Administration (IGA), Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM), and Non-Human Identity management.
Why teams buy it
Attackers target identities more than any other attack surface. Stolen credentials are the leading cause of breaches. Regulatory frameworks including SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and NIS2 require demonstrable access controls and audit trails.
Teams also buy IAM to reduce operational burden. Manual account provisioning is slow and error-prone. Automated lifecycle management cuts help-desk tickets and removes orphaned accounts that create unnecessary risk.