Digital Identity

Digital Identity is the digital representation of a person, a device or a system within an IT environment. It comprises unique identifiers, credentials for authentication and descriptive attributes such as roles, group memberships or permissions.

Digital identities have long existed not only for people: service accounts, applications, APIs and devices have their own identities, whose number exceeds that of employees many times over in many organizations. Each of these identities is at the same time a key to resources and a potential gateway for attackers – stolen or misused identities are among the most common starting points of modern attacks.

With the dissolution of classic network perimeters through cloud and remote work, the digital identity has become the de facto security perimeter: whoever controls the identity controls the access to applications and data. The protection of digital identities over their entire lifecycle is therefore the subject of Identity Security.