Identity and Access Management (IAM) refers to technology and processes for managing identities and access permissions for users, computing devices, and applications. IAM provides full lifecycle management by providing the means and credentials for identification during the onboarding process, through to authenticating and authorizing access to resources, and all the way to revoking access credentials and identities.
IAM solutions can manage identities and access to resources that reside on-premise or in the cloud. Deployment can be on-premise, in the cloud, or hybrid, where some instances of the IAM system are installed on-premise and some in the cloud, with all instances replicating/syncing data from one another.