Identity and Access Management (IAM)
Software that controls who can log into which systems and what they're allowed to do once inside — authentication (proving who you are) plus authorization (what you can access).
IAM platforms handle single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, and access-policy enforcement across a company's other software, plus (for a growing subset of the category) continuous compliance monitoring against frameworks like SOC 2 or ISO 27001. Buyers should distinguish workforce IAM (employees logging into internal tools) from customer identity (CIAM, authenticating a product's end users) — some vendors serve both, others specialize in one. As AI agents increasingly act as machine identities, whether a platform has a clear model for agent/service authentication (versus only human SSO) is becoming a real differentiator, not just a compliance checkbox.
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