IAM.
The discipline of managing digital identities (users, service accounts, machine identities) and controlling their access to systems and data. Core practices include SSO, MFA, RBAC, PAM, and periodic access reviews.
Identity and Access Management is the practical foundation of most other security controls. Zero Trust depends on it, compliance frameworks have entire control families devoted to it, and most breaches trace back to credential failures somewhere in the IAM stack. A mature IAM program covers: identity sources (HR system as source of truth for joiners/leavers/movers), authentication (SSO + MFA + passwordless), authorization (RBAC at minimum, ABAC for higher-risk systems), privileged access (PAM for break-glass and admin paths), and continuous governance (quarterly access reviews, automated SoD enforcement). Service accounts and machine identities now outnumber human identities in most enterprises, and they need the same lifecycle discipline.
Connected concepts.
MFA
Multi-factor authenticationA security mechanism requiring two or more verification factors to access a resource. Factors fall into three categories: something you know (password), something you have (phone, token), something you are (biometric). MFA is the single highest-ROI control for most organizations.
Zero Trust
Zero-trust security architectureA security model that assumes no user or device is trusted by default, regardless of whether they’re inside the network perimeter. Every access request is verified, authenticated, and authorized. Often summarized as "never trust, always verify."
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