Qu'est-ce que la gestion des identités et des accès (IAM) ?

Workforce Identity vs. Customer Identity

The scenario described above largely describes workforce identity, whereby companies provide their employees and partners with secure access to applications. But there is a much larger demand for identity solutions that protect customers who are increasingly living their lives online. The rise in online activity has created the need for customer identity and access management (CIAM) solutions to protect consumers as they access online banking, e-commerce sites, government services, tele-health services, and much more.

Why Digital Identity is so Important

Everyone and everything that connects to the internet has an identity. In IAM terms, these may include employees, partners, contractors, customers, suppliers, computers, servers, smartphones, IoT devices, applications/workloads, and APIs. Each of these entities has an identity that must be confirmed and its permissions must be assessed before access to any resources can be granted. It's not unusual for an enterprise to have many millions of identities connecting to its resources.

La tâche consistant à confirmer les identités et à gérer leurs autorisations d'accès est effectuée de manière optimale par une plateforme IAM complète. Celle-ci doit être rapide et évolutive pour prendre rapidement et efficacement des décisions d'accès intelligentes sans affecter les performances, même pendant les périodes de trafic élevé.

What should an IAM solution offer?

Single Sign-On (SSO) – SSO allows users to login once to gain access to all their applications and services whether they're in the cloud or data center. It prevents the frustration of repeated logins, which harm productivity in the enterprise and cause customer drop-off for e-commerce sites.

Multifactor Authentication (MFA)– MFA improves security by requiring an added credential, such as a fingerprint (biometric), acceptance of a push notification via authenticator app, or a one-time password (OTS) delivered via text message or email. With MFA, even with login credentials, an attack will not succeed in gaining access to targeted resources.

Authorization – Authorization is used to determine the [authenticated] user's approved level of access. In the enterprise, entities are granted certain privileges related to what may be accessed, based on their roles, and such access may be extremely granular. For example, an accountant may have extensive privileges within most financial applications, but not those related to compensation.

How IAM Enhances the User Experience

Whether you're talking about IAM in the enterprise or CIAM for providers of consumer services, user experience is a top priority.

In the enterprise, it's important to connect users, especially employees, to their resources as quickly as possible to keep workflows moving and productivity high. In the consumer marketplace, the stakes are even higher. A company's registration or login page is the "front door" to its business. If a consumer has a bad experience upon entering the "store," the company has a very high chance of losing that customer. In the financial services sector, for example, 40% of consumers abandon their registrations when opening a new bank account for reasons that include an overly lengthy process, time-consuming authentication, and difficulty filling out forms.¹

An intelligent IAM system also reduces helpdesk calls. A 2022 Total Economic Impact study by Forrester Consulting on behalf of ForgeRock showed that CIAM could reduce security-related calls to the help center by 40%, resulting in a cost savings of $24 million.

IAM's Role in Compliance

All organizations are subject to regulatory audits, and they must demonstrate compliance and repeatable results. That's why many companies are turning to IAM solutions based on a Zero Trust model, which removes all implicit trust and grants access to resources based on the continuous evaluation of user identity, device posture, and fine-grained access policies defined by the organization. Zero Trust, built on the principle of least-privileged access, removes the risk of overly permissive policies, which are a compliance risk, and eliminates the ability of unauthorized users to move laterally across a network.

IAM infused with AI/ML also supports compliance by fully automating the access review and approval processes. It also reduces human errors and the problems that can occur as a result of too many access requests, which often lead to over-provisioned users and failed compliance audits.

Finally, data sovereignty is a key requirement of many regulations, and companies must be able to prove that data is being stored in its country or region or origin. You need a cloud architecture with full tenant isolation to meet the strictest global privacy and data residency requirements, and to keep your sensitive data and backups under your control and in the required region or country.