Core principles of identity, authentication protocols, and foundational security architecture.
An introductory guide to the founding concept of IAM: what a digital identity is, the four words that get mixed up (subject, identity, account and profile), and the pieces that make an identity work in practice: attributes, claims, entitlements and credentials.
Beyond human users: the identities of devices, workloads and AI agents, and why the whole industry now says that identity, not the network, is the new security perimeter.
How IAM fits into the NIST CSF, which MITRE ATT&CK techniques it counters, and what the Verizon DBIR and Mandiant M-Trends reports say about why credentials are today's main way in for attackers.
IAM's evolution in four waves, from the IT optimization of the 1990s to today's identity security, and why knowing that history helps you read the decisions you'll find in any organization.
A walk through the five domains that make up modern IAM, access management, IGA, PAM, CIAM and ITDR, with what each one does, who it serves, how it looks in practice and where the domains overlap.
What the daily processes of an IAM program look like in practice: aggregation from authoritative sources, the master record, account correlation, orphan detection and the joiner-mover-leaver cycle, with a complete healthcare case.
A deep dive into the joiner-mover-leaver lifecycle: the identity as a state machine, birthright, role-based, requestable and just-in-time access, why the mover is the hardest step, how leavers should be removed, who owns what, how maturity grows, what to measure, how it fails and which regulations require it.
A complete worked example of the operational IAM cycle and JML in a hospital network with a public and a private wing: several authoritative sources, doctors who work in both, rotating residents, break-glass access to medical records, removal of access when a license lapses and HIPAA-grade audit.
A complete worked example of the operational IAM cycle and JML in a fast-growing cashback startup, where the enemy is speed and SaaS sprawl rather than regulation: SCIM provisioning from an identity provider, role templates per squad, just-in-time production access, offboarding across dozens of SaaS apps, and meeting SOC 2 and PCI DSS while growing tenfold.
A complete worked example of the operational IAM cycle and JML in a consolidated mid-sized IT consultancy, where consultants rotate constantly between client engagements, much of their access lives in clients' own tenants through federation, the mover is the main event and the core risk is one client's data following a consultant to the next.