1 Introduction

IAM (Identity & Access Management) has evolved as a core discipline of IT over the past years. It takes a central role in enabling seamless and convenient access of users, but also for cybersecurity, regulatory compliance, and administrative efficiency. Efficiently managing and restricting access to systems and applications and enforcing the least privilege principle is essential to any organization.

The broader discipline of IAM is split into three major areas:

• IGA (Identity Governance & Administration), consisting of
  • User Lifecycle Management: The ability to manage the lifecycle of users and their accounts, frequently described as JML (Joiner, Mover, Leaver).
  • Identity Provisioning: The technical provisioning of user accounts and entitlements into target systems, based on the user lifecycle.
  • Access Governance: The governance of access entitlements, from access request and approval to regular review and recertification of entitlements.
• Access Management: Solutions for managing authentication and access to applications and services, including Web Access Management and Identity Federation.
• Privileged Access Management (PAM): The management of access and entitlements for highly privileged users such as administrators, including capabilities such as session management and monitoring, and shared account password management.

Beyond these, there are several specialized disciplines such as password management or secure information sharing, adding to the overall IAM solution framework.

While IAM is established in large organizations, many mid-market and medium-sized organizations are still lacking a comprehensive IAM solution. In many organizations, IAM is factually a mix of baseline capabilities in Microsoft Active Directory or Microsoft Azure Active Directory, and manual administration. PAM commonly is done, if at all, based on low-level, technical solutions. While such a scenario serves the Access Management and PAM requirements at least to a certain extent, it leaves a wide gap for IGA.

The IGA challenge is that the common solutions have been targeted at large organizations. While such solutions are powerful and feature-rich, their complexity in deployment and operations exceed what most mid-market and medium-sized organizations can execute. There is a need for solutions that deliver the capabilities that are required by such organizations, but without the overhead and complexity of many of the IGA solutions targeted at large enterprises.

Managing user accounts and entitlements centrally, but with reasonable effort and focused on the typical IT environments in the mid-market and medium-sized organizations, is an IAM market segment of itself.

Tenfold Security is one of the providers delivering a solution that is targeted at this segment, covering all major requirements from user lifecycle management to self-services and reporting, based on a high degree of automation.