Identity Management (IdM) is an integrated system of business processes, policies and technologies that enable organizations to facilitate and control their users' access to critical online applications and resources — while protecting confidential personal and business information from unauthorized users. It represents a category of interrelated solutions that are employed to administer user authentication, access rights, access restrictions, account profiles, passwords, and other attributes supportive of users' roles/profiles on one or more applications or systems.

Solutions which fall under the category of Identity Management:

Management of Identities

• Provisioning/Deprovisioning of accounts
• Workflow automation
• Delegated administration
• Password Synchronization
• Self-Service Password Reset

Access Control

• Policy based access control
• Enterprise/Legacy Single Sign On (SSO) and Single Signout
• Web Single Sign On (SSO)
• Reduced Sign On

Directory Services

• Identity Repository (directory services for administration of user account attributes)
• Meta-data Replication/Synchronization
• Directory Virtualization (virtual directory)

Other categories

• Role-based access control (RBAC)
• Federation of user access rights on web applications across otherwise untrusted networks
• Directory enabled networking and 802.1X EAP

Standards Initiatives

• Project Liberty - An industry consortium
• Shibboleth - Identity standards targeted towards educational environments.

See also

• Single sign-on (SSO)
• Directory service
• metadirectory and virtual directory
• LDAP
• Digital identity
• Authentic source

External links

• Dramatically reduce the Total Cost of Ownership of Identity Management

• Defining Enterprise Identity Management
• Identity Management Terminology
• Identity Management Project Roadmap
• Stand & Deliver (PDF)
• Digital Identity Revolution
• Identity Management & Sarbanes-Oxley
• Provisioning & Password Reset ROI Analysis

Computer security procedures | Identity management systems | Identity management

Identitätsmanagement | Identity Management | Identity management | Zarządzanie tożsamością