What is Identity and Access Management and Why is it Important
What results from a quick Google search on top cybersecurity jobs today? Is Identity and Access Management (IAM) mentioned? I’m prepared to bet it didn’t even make the top ten. When you visit https://www.cyberseek.org/heatmap.html and look at their top cybersecurity job titles, you’ll find titles like developer, engineer, systems administrator, and penetration tester.
These are popular roles in the cybersecurity profession nowadays. I’m surprised not to see cloud engineers or architects on this list, but I digress. You could argue that you are qualified to be an IAM developer or engineer. Consider conducting a fast search on the SANS Institute’s top 20 coolest cybersecurity occupations. In that situation, IAM is not specifically mentioned. Still, if you want to be exact, it would be #7, a blue teamer, because in my opinion, IAM is playing defense because you are protecting your users’ identities and ensuring they have access to only what they need.
That being said, the cybersecurity landscape is evolving, and IAM is finally receiving attention, or was it always present but not as hip as an ethical hacker? The Open Worldwide Application Security Project, or OWASP for short, has a list of the top ten web application security threats, and guess what was the top danger in 2021? I’m sure you didn’t guess it was due to faulty access control.
It gets us to the question of what IAM is and why it is so crucial in cybersecurity. IAM is where we check a user’s identity and allow access to software, networks, and even servers so individuals can accomplish their jobs. IAM is significant since many hackers seek to compromise the user’s identity first. You know those entertaining phishing emails you get? It is one type of hacker who hopes to obtain your password in order to gain access to a system and cause harm.
Let’s go over the principles of IAM. The first is identity proofing or confirming that you are whom you say you are. Identity proofing is the process of validating a user using multiple approaches. Some examples are:
1. Making use of a known username and password
2. With a token, a device, or something you own
3. Using your face, fingerprint, or something you are
These are the three most popular methods of proving one’s identification. In subsequent blog entries, I’ll go through each strategy in further depth.
After confirming the user’s identification, the following step is to provide the user access to anything. This can be a user’s device, such as a laptop, or access to a specific application, such as SalesForce, or even another device, such as a server. This is called access management. We will dive deeper into the common authorization models used today.
To summarize, what is IAM? IAM is how we ensure that the right individuals get access to the appropriate applications for the right reasons. The importance of IAM stems from the fact that utilizing multiple methods to access a device is so ubiquitous that we forget how easy it is to have your identity compromised. This can lead to hackers exploiting your credentials to obtain access to your company’s network and potentially do harm, such as stealing trade secrets or bringing your company’s network down, which can cost you millions to repair.
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