Interested in IAM as a career? Read on and find it out.
1. What is IAM
According to Gartner, Identity and Access Management (IAM) is the discipline that enables the right individual to access the right resources at the right time for the right reasons. Fundamentally, it addresses two pieces: Authentication and Authorization. Authentication is the process of proving you are who you claimed you are. Authorization is after you are identified, what kind of permissions or resources that you are allowed to access. Authorization comes after Authentication, as you will have to know who the user is and then determine what level of access the user has.
2. IAM is Complicated
The concept of Authentication and Authorization is fairly easy to grasp. However, the IAM problem in the real world could be very complicated, especially in this era of digital age.
Take any company as an example, say an e-commerce web-store (Amazon or similar), a customer to buy products needs to register for an account. An e-commerce company could have thousands or even millions of user accounts. These accounts may have different types, consumer account, small business partner, 3rd-party service accounts and etc. To manage those accounts properly is no easy task and a large IAM system is usually needed. Nevertheless, perspectives like system reliability, security, performance, function capabilities and etc. all need to be handled well for that IAM system.
3. Why is IAM Important
from the example above, you can have some sense on why IAM is important to an enterprise. This is because identity is usually a core component of a business and handling it well is mandatory for mid-to-large enterprises. Furthermore, from a security perspective, IAM is usually the front line of defending a system. A well implemented IAM system can hugely increase the security level of an enterprise system.
4. IAM Trend
If we look back for about twenty years, there are not many IAM products available in the market. The main reason could be that Internet was just invented and starting to get popular. We were still at the web 1.0 and online system are just not that complicated. However, looking at what we have right now, things have changed so much. Big Data, Cloud Services, AI, IoT, BlockChain, Web 3.0 and etc. are all blooming. All these just happened in the past twenty years and we can forecast that the trending will be exponential in the future twenty years. These changes will only just bring more challenges for IAM and hence a demand for more resources (products, people and capital).
North America IAM Market Trend
5. IAM as a Career
A potential market doesn't necessarily mean a good career. Here, we can use a simple but effective Demand and Supply economic theory to explain for the IAM industry; in other words, when the demand is high and supply is limited, the price will be high. This apply to IAM professionals and here are the reasons.
First, we know that IAM market trend is going up, that's easy to grasp from the above mentioning. Hence, the demand will be growing as time goes on.
Second, on the other hand, the supply for IAM will be limited. Take full stack development as an example, anybody who is interested in coding can go to internet and find some much materials to study. Thousands of books, lessons, courses and bootcamps are readily accessible. In other words, the barrier for jumping in full stack development profession is fairly low and hence, its supply will be pumping as well.
In contrary to full stack, IAM has a higher barrier. Online materials are limited and therefore, the number of people who can jump in this territory will be limited.
Third, IAM usually deals with large enterprises and the pay is attracting.
6. Other Important Things to Consider
There are perspectives to consider as well
IAM focus more on integration rather than coding
IAM market potential is huge, but compared to full stack, it is still considered a niche market
The required knowledge (width and depth) is less than full stack
IAM solution usually relies on some vendor products like ForgeRock or Ping Identity
IAM architecture and integration patterns can a lot of times be reused
7. Sum Up
Some high level aspects of IAM are covered in this post. In general I would say IAM has a promising career path, especially if you are interested in this type of work.