Thoughts on IAM

What are every ones role on IAM roles? Where does one to begin to have a career in IAM? Any certs? Can one make a career out of it or will it die down eventually?

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LeBroke

Personally, I'm in the DevOps IAM group, which allows me to assume Administrator roles in all of our company's AWS accounts via their ARN.

But I feel like we're talking about different things here.

NetworkNewb

I don't know of certs in particular but I know I deal ALOT with it. More than I would like! My manager and I are working on a plan to implement a whole new IAM solution and how everything is setup at my company. Zero chance it will die down IMO. And yes I know a handful places that have engineers and analyst who solely deal with IAM. Smaller companies wouldn't need people whose role is to deal with it by itself. But larger ones do.

Knowing how identities are connected and setup to different things like AD, Cloud apps, on-prem apps are key so you could focus on certifications that cover things like those technologies. For example I'm thinking of going to go after CCSP and MCSA 365 next year so I know how to best handle identities in those areas.

JoJoCal19

IAM is easy work. Generally it is a subset of security, although some companies keep it separate from security. I did it for 6 years at a major bank. It was pretty repetitive and metric based where I was at. As far as its future, I know when I worked at the bank they were automating the IAM processes more and more. It's definitely one of the areas of IT that lends itself well to automation, that's for sure.

stlsmoore

I always thought of IAM as just a part of a security engineers toolset. Rather than their sole focus, but it seems like for bigger Fortune 500 companies there are roles just for IAM.

TheFORCE

As someone that has worked in the IAM field for close to 5 years and have implemented 2 IAM solutions from the architecture phase to production deployment and also currently working on another similiar project I can tell you its not easy work.

There are a lot of things that are involved and you need the right people to back you up. Automation is great but it doesn't make the job or IAM tasks obsolete, you just need to have a different set of skills now in order to be efficient.

If you were doing various IAM tasks with excel and Vlookups now you need to understand SQL databases or various automation workflows. The role didn't change, the skills you used has changed.

There is a big value to someone with IAM experience in the right company. My company even has someone with the title of Director of IAM.

Chivalry1

For a corporate sized organization, IAM is a fairly large/complex area and is typically apart of the InfoSec departments. Job searches on Indeed.com for IAM roles are typically InfoSec position . Certification often requested are CISSP/CCSP/CISA. Most won't consider IAM as easy work and is quite challenging and in-depth. This includes areas & responsibilities of Privileges Access Management (PAM), Privileged Identity Management (PIM), Identity Protection (IP), Single Sign-On (SSO), Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA). If you company is moving into the cloud space (Azure or Amazon) then dedicated IAM resources should be critical.

Gartner host an outstanding IAM summit every year and the depth of knowledge is tremendous. Identity Access Management is only going to grow since it aligns so closely with IT security programs. IAM definitely has much value of in the IT market space.