Identity and Access Management (IAM): A Comprehensive Guide

Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a framework of business processes, policies, and technologies that enables the right individuals to access the right resources at the right times for the right reasons. It addresses three core questions: Who are you? What are you allowed to do? Are you following the rules? IAM consists of authentication, authorization, and accountability components, which work together to ensure secure access control. The system must be highly available, scalable, and globally distributed, with strong consistency and transactional guarantees to support real-time access decisions and compliance monitoring. A modern IAM system needs to handle managing local authentications, supporting the rest of IAM is a layer called Administration, which has three major pillars: Authentication, Authorization, and Accountability. The article explores how distributed databases like CockroachDB are enabling a new standard of always-on, scalable, and globally distributed IAM.