identity

In my post on Identity and Access Management (IAM), I provided a very high-level view of how modern authentication works on the basis of a centralized Identity provider, like Azure Active Directory. In this post, let’s look at a Microsoft Azure video, where Azure AD Program manager Stuart Kwan presents the basics of modern claims-based authentication in a lucid and eloquent way. Clearly if a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is probably worth a million!

Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a framework of policies and technologies to ensure the right people or machines to access the right assets or resources. Identity: In this digital age, an identity can be either a human (user), a software component (application) or a hardware component (computer, mobile or IoT device). Just like any identity document in the real-world, identities serve is a way to authenticate and authorize access to assets and resources.