Author: Paul Bedi

Overview

In today's digital age there is a need to establish and maintain credentials on many connected and disconnected systems, and in turn use these credentials to grant rights or access to users. Identity Management refers to all of the unrelated components in the owner-ownership equation and the process of electronically brokering the entire setup.

The practice extends itself from basic recognition techniques used to identify material goods based on identification systems such as UPC symbols while employing MAC address to identify the electronic components. Therefore, instituting IdM facilitates in clearly defining all the individual people and various assets in the owner-ownership model.

Our goal is to manage physical resources (any material item) and logical resources (any virtual item) and relate them to an owner or a group of owners. This model, although simple, is sophisticated in its ability to seamlessly manage these various resources across many complex systems.

For example, banks identify account owners by their account number and governments identify owners of passports with passport numbers, both of which are unrelated. The identification issue gets highlighted when the owner and the identifier need to be complex and unique within the constraints of their particular information systems.