IAM essentially comprises two core disciplines:

Identity Management

Identity Management focuses on the creation, management, and authentication of user identities within an organization. It is essentially responsible for answering the 'who' when accessing systems. This includes defining and managing user roles, permissions, and privileges.

Identity Management typically involves creating and maintaining a centralized directory of users, which are often linked to specific applications or systems. The goal is to provide a single source of truth for all user identities in an organization, streamlining access management processes.

Key Components:

• User Provisioning - Ensures the right access levels are set when employees join, change roles, or leave the company.

• Authentication - Verifies the identity of users through methods like passwords, biometrics, or two-factor authentication (2FA).

• Directory Services - Maintains centralized user data repositories for efficient identity tracking and access control.

Benefits:

• Simplifies the user onboarding/offboarding process.

• Reduces password management challenges by implementing single sign-on (SSO).

Example Use Case: When an employee is hired, Identity Management ensures they are provisioned with appropriate system privileges relevant to their role. Similarly, their access is revoked promptly when they leave, reducing security risks.

Access Management

A framework for defining, assigning, managing and administering user access rights to organizational resources, as well as authenticating users when they access those resources. The A in IAM can sometimes refer to “authentication” rather than “access”. While many software solutions exist for identity and access management, a lot of them are targeted primarily at large organizations. The result is that smaller and midsize organizations often resort to manual methods of managing user identities and access rights, such as using spreadsheets to keep records of users and their access privileges.

Access Rights Management (ARM) is the process of controlling and managing access to resources and information within an organization. ARM helps to ensure that sensitive information is protected and that only authorized users have access to it. 
Typical challenges which European organizations experience in relation to ARM include:

• Limited tools available at the organization: access rights requests might be still done using email, MS Word and MS Excel templates, with no single point where all records are maintained.
• Difficulty to enforce and manage approval chains with flexibility.
• Difficulty to audit changes or updates to information related to approvals, entitlements or ownership's.

Key Components of Access Management

Example Use Case: A senior accountant might be authorized to access payroll systems but restricted from viewing engineering project files.