Gartner defines identity governance and administration (IGA) as the solution to manage the identity life cycle and govern access across on-premises and cloud environments. To accomplish this, IGA tools aggregate and correlate disparate identity and access rights data, and provide full capability controls over accounts and associated access. IGA solutions also fulfill the purpose of unifying and correlating identity data for organizations with multiple person and machine identity authoritative sources. This is done to provide a single view of identity (system of record) for their dependent processes and systems
Non-human identity management (NHIM) refers to the systematic approach of creating, maintaining, and governing digital identities for entities that are not human users within an organization's technology ecosystem. This encompasses a broad spectrum of automated systems, applications, services, devices, and processes that require authenticated access to networks, databases, and other digital resources to perform their designated functions. These identities, often called machine identities, are used to authenticate and authorize automated processes and secure communication across IT environments. They differ from human identities as they aren't tied to a specific person and often don't use traditional authentication methods like passwords or multi-factor authentication (MFA). Instead, they rely on credentials like API keys, certificates, secrets, and tokens. NHIM ensures that these identities are properly governed, have the principle of least privilege, and are continuously monitored to prevent unauthorized access and mitigate security risks. Typical users of NHIM include IT and Security teams, DevOps and Platform Engineering teams and Cloud Architects and Administrators, whose overall goal is to provide the same level of security governance for non-human identities as organizations maintain for their human workforce while supporting the automation and scalability requirements of modern digital infrastructure.
Gartner defines privileged access management (PAM) as tools that provide an elevated level of technical access through the management and protection of accounts, credentials and commands, which are used to administer or configure systems and applications. PAM tools — available as software, SaaS or hardware appliances — manage privileged access for both people (system administrators and others) and machines (systems or applications). Gartner defines four distinct tool categories for PAM tools: privileged account and session management (PASM), privilege elevation and delegation management (PEDM), secrets management, and cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM).