What is IAM - Identity and Access Management?

Identity Access Management (IAM) represents the processes, technology and people used to create, manage, authenticate, control and remove user (internal, external or customer) permission to corporate technology resources.

To perform their job functions, internal IT users need access to corporate systems and applications. Similarly, an organization's customers need access to web-facing applications in order to complete any number of approved interactions. For all of these instances, IAM is an important function to help manage user interactions and prevent cybersecurity incidents through the abuse of credentials. Some of the most common components of an IAM program include single sign on (SSO), access management and user authentication.