Access management
Access Management, or Digital Access Management, refers to an infrastructure that supports the federation of identities across secure institutional boundaries without compromising the security, privacy and intellectual property rights of either end-users and the owners or institutions.
Development of access management services across diverse institutions and systems involves consolidation and integration of related services and issues including: auditing, authentication, authorisation, automated identity management, directory services, network security, personalisation, password synchronisation, role-based access control, single sign-on, security workflow, self-service administration, trust communities and user provisioning technology.
- Audit: tracking of user activity within systems for identification and management of security, access, legislative and licence compliance issues
- Authentication: concerns who a user is, typically involving a username and password based authentication service
- Authorisation: concerns what access a user gets
- Automated Identity Management: automated administration of account information, passwords, security directives and access rights centrally which apply across a range of systems and platforms
- Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): the grouping of users into logical role-based groups in order to specify which groups within a system have access to particular services
- Single Sign-on (SSO): an initial log in which allows a user with a recognised security level to access multiple resources using that single login
- User Provisioning: term used in IT environments to describe the provision of equipment and services required by a user. In the area of Access Management provisioning refers in particular to the automation of the steps required to setup, modify, and delete (deprovision) user or system access quickly, securely, and verifiably.
(Source: http://www.networkworld.com/topics/identity-management.html)