Regardless of where employees are working, they need to access their organization’s resources like apps, files, and data. The traditional way of doing things was to have the vast majority of workers work on-site, where company resources were kept behind a firewall. Once on-site and logged in, employees could access the things they needed.

Now, however, hybrid work is more common than ever and employees need secure access to company resources whether they’re working on-site or remotely. This is where identity and access management (IAM) comes in. The organization’s IT department needs a way to control what users can and can’t access so that sensitive data and functions are restricted to only the people and things that need to work with them.

IAM gives secure access to company resources—like emails, databases, data, and applications—to verified entities, ideally with a bare minimum of interference. The goal is to manage access so that the right people can do their jobs and the wrong people, like hackers, are denied entry.

The need for secure access extends beyond employees working on company machines. It also includes contractors, vendors, business partners, and people working on personal devices. IAM makes sure that each person who should have access has the right level of access at the right time on the right machine. Because of this, and the role it plays in an organization’s cybersecurity, IAM is a vital part of modern IT.

With an IAM system, the organization can quickly and accurately verify a person’s identity and that they have the necessary permissions to use the requested resource during each access attempt.