The Four Pillars of Identity and Access Management (IAM) Explained

To build a secure organization with robust cybersecurity foundations, securing identities and managing access is crucial. Ensuring that only authorized individuals, employees, partners, and customers can access specific resources is single most important step for minimizing the risk of data breaches, unauthorized access, and insider threats.

With cyberattacks becoming more sophisticated, compromised credentials are a leading cause of security incidents, making identity protection a top priority. By securing identities and access, organizations can better protect sensitive information, maintain business continuity, and build trust with stakeholders.

A well-implemented Identity and Access Management (IAM) strategy ensures this balance, empowering productivity, while maintaining strong security. Ultimately, securing identities and access safeguards an organization’s digital assets, supports its operational goals, and protects its overall resilience against cyber threats.

What is Identity and Access Management?

Identity and Access Management is a framework that controls which users have access to which digital resources at a company. The main goals of IAM are to:

Enforce the principle of least privilege
Provide a streamlined way to verify users’ identities and grant access to the information they need
Deny threat actors or unauthorized users access to sensitive information

With the rise of remote work and fewer employees connecting to company resources from on-premises systems, organizations need new ways to ensure that only appropriate and pre-approved users can gain access. Part of this practice involves confirming that users are who they claim to be, before they are granted access to resources. Without all the elements of an IAM strategy in place, organizations become more susceptible to threats including breaches and data leaks.

What does an effective IAM strategy look like in practice?

There are many elements to an Identity and access management strategy. Some of these elements will depend on the size of organization, or the unique ways that your employees need access. IAM strategies tend to be applied in the following ways:

To enable organizations to securely enable remote work and/or BYOD for their employees
Ensure that third parties or contractors are given access to everything they need to perform their job function and nothing more
Ensuring compliance with regulatory frameworks and legal requirements

By implementing IAM systems, organizations can streamline authentication and authorization processes, enforce security policies, and maintain compliance with regulatory standards. This acts as another line of defense against keeping threat actors out of company networks.

What Are The Four Pillars Of IAM?

Together, these pillars form the foundation for managing and securing user access within an organization. They are:

Authentication – Defined as “verifying the identity of a user, process, or device, often as a prerequisite to allowing access to resources in an information system.” Authentication methods can include passwords as well as passwordless options like hardware tokens, passkeys, SSO, and MFA.
Authorization – Defined as “the process of verifying that a requested action or service is approved for a specific entity.” This differs from authentication because rather than checking if a user is legitimate, authorization checks if a user should be allowed to access a given resource. A user can be authenticated without being authorized. Authorization is typically determined using Role-Based Access Control (RBAC.) This approach grants valid users access to resources based on their assigned role within the company.
Administration – Defined as “the process of managing user identities, roles, and access privileges within an organization’s IAM system.” This is the process of managing an organization’s policies as well as what roles and permissions each user or group may have. Tasks that would fall under the umbrella of administration include provisioning user accounts / groups, setting permissions for which resources those users / groups can access, and ensuring that those policies are enforced.
Auditing – Defined as “independent review and examination of records and activities to assess the adequacy of system controls and ensure compliance with established policies and operational procedures.” This involves keeping a trail of what actions have been performed. This is also where that compliance piece comes into play; using tools like IAM to track activity and present proof of compliance to auditors is going to be much easier for IT teams than tracking these items manually.

Expert Insight’s IAM Resources: