User Access Management (UAM) is the process of identifying, tracking, controlling and managing a specified users' access to a system or application.

 
 
 
 

You can think of User Access Management from two perspectives:

  1. Internal – users within an organization
  2. External – users outside an organization
 
 

Internal User Access Management

Internal user access management is about enabling users within an organization to have access to the resources and tools they need, while making sure they are unable to access things they shouldn’t.

For example, an entry-level employee needs access to certain tools in order to do their job, but they shouldn’t have access to everything a CEO does.

 
 

External User Access Management

 

External user access management follows the same logic, but outside the organization. It is about managing users’ access to a resource (such as an application), so that only authorized users have access.

The best example of this is commercial: a software business sells a software product to their customers and they want to make sure only those who have paid for it can access and use the software application.

Depending on the specific use case, this may be referred to as Software Licensing or Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM).

10Duke is a specialist in both. In fact, 10Duke is the only company in the market that provides both software licensing and customer identity management in one solution that allows you to effectively monetize your software product.

 
 
 
 

If that’s what you’re looking for, we strongly recommend reading our guide to software licensing or our blog on our unique approach called Identity-based licensing.

If you’re looking to learn about how to manage user access within your organization, read on.

 

User Access Management Explained

User Access Management (UAM), is also known as identity and access management (IAM). It is a broad concept that encompasses all policies, processes, methodologies and tools that maintain access privileges within an IT environment. For businesses, this usually includes access to third-party applications, permissions, and security requirements.

 
 
 
 

With identity and access management, identity management creates, provisions and controls different users, roles, groups and policies, and access management ensures that these roles and policies are followed. 

A user access management based system stores the different user roles and their profiles, and processes user access requests based on this stored information.

You may also be interested in learning about Privileged Access Management.

 

IAM Solutions Help Your Organization Stay Productive and Secure

Today, many challenges can arise as companies grow, and the number of individuals with varying roles and responsibilities also grows. They all need access to the right tools at the right time, in order to do their jobs and provisioning access is becoming increasingly more complex, particularly when you introduce shadow IT.

Employees are increasingly using external enterprise solutions to do their jobs and an identity and access management solution helps maintain a compliant and correctly provisioned enterprise by providing a seamless way to manage user identities and access all in one place.

User Access Management allows IT administrators to create and manage users and groups, and assign permissions based on user attributes. Users will also often be able to access a large number of SaaS apps directly through a Single Sign-On (SSO) solution, which means fewer password resets for IT and more streamlined workflows for end-users.

Just like identity management, user life-cycle management is a key element of user access management. Employee onboarding and offboarding, department or location changes all make it more difficult for organisations to make sure that access privileges are appropriate and prevent unwanted accumulation of access rights.

To summarise, user access management ensures that an overview of all permissions of all staff members is maintained at all times.

If you’re looking for an IAM solution to take care of your organization’s internal needs, you may want to check out companies like Okta, OneLogin or Auth0.

If you’re looking to manage users that are your customers and to make sure only the users that have paid have access to your product, schedule a demo with 10Duke or check out our products.

 
 

Learn the Basics of 10Duke Software Licensing

 
 
 
20th August 2021

10Duke 101 – Understanding the Basics of 10Duke Licensing

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18th February 2021

Software IP Protection – How to Protect Software Intellectual Property?

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Top 5 Reasons for Identity & Access Management Strategy

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5th June 2020

What is Identity-based Licensing?

Identity-based licensing is a method by 10Duke of controlling access to a digital product based on the authenticated identity of an individual.
19th May 2020

What is Identity Federation? Guide to Federated Identity

We get a lot of questions from partners regarding ‘federated identity’ or ‘identity federation’, so we thought we’d do a short summary to explain what it […]
23rd December 2019

Why You Should Choose Multi-Factor Authentication Implementation

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29th October 2019

What is SCA (Strong Customer Authentication) and PSD2?

SCA first came into being in September 2019* as a response to the European Second Payment Services Directive (PSD2). These plans detail a list of requirements […]
13th February 2019

The Art of Digital Identity

Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a discipline within cybersecurity that seeks to ensure that only the right people can access the appropriate data and resources, […]
25th September 2015

Managing Customer Access In a World of Subscriptions and Paywalls

Organisations have been distributing digital content, to consumers for a long time and yet for many, the issue of managing customer access and how to monetise […]