Identity and access management (IAM)

Identity and access management (IAM) comprises policies and tools for managing digital identities and controlling access to information and functionality. Two of the fundamental concepts of IAM are authentication and authorization.

Authentication

Authentication is the process of determining if someone (or something) is who (or what) they claim to be. It deals primarily with validating the identity of a subject. Examples of a subject that may need to be authenticated include a user, a service, a computer, or an application.

In the early days of software development, applications would commonly maintain their own user profiles for authentication, which would include some type of unique identifier...