Becoming familiar with the common IAM standards

IAM is a complex domain, and in order to ensure that its desired functionalities are delivered in a secure, consistent, and compliant way, several standards and protocols have been developed throughout time. As an architect, you need to become very familiar with these standards, understand how they operate and how they differ from one another, and exactly when to propose using any of them. Moreover, some of these standards have known and well-defined processes that describe precisely how to use the given standard to authenticate a user for a given use case. These processes are referred to as the authentication flows.

To understand the authentication and authorization concept and how standards are used therein, let's take a simple example. Assume you are traveling from the UK to the USA. When you attempt to cross the US border control, they would want to verify your identity. And let's assume that there is also a need to...