Identity & Access Management (IAM) Services

Why identity and access management is the new perimeter

Most modern attacks start with stolen or weak credentials. As companies move to cloud apps and remote work, identity — who someone is and what they are allowed to do — has become the main security boundary. Strong identity and access management (IAM) reduces account takeovers, simplifies onboarding and offboarding, and gives auditors clear evidence of who can access what.

IAM also shapes user experience. Customers expect to sign in with Google, Apple or Microsoft; enterprise buyers expect SAML single sign-on; staff expect one login for all tools. Getting this right is both a security and a sales requirement.

Problems we solve

• Separate passwords for every internal tool
• Enterprise prospects asking for SAML SSO and SCIM provisioning
• Former employees still having access weeks after leaving
• Permissions hard-coded and inconsistent across features
• No multi-factor authentication for admins or customers

What’s included

Build or buy authentication?

Authentication is hard to build securely, so we rarely recommend writing it from scratch. Identity platforms such as Auth0, Okta Customer Identity, Microsoft Entra External ID, AWS Cognito, Clerk or open-source Keycloak handle password storage, MFA, social login and SSO. We help you choose based on cost at your user volume, enterprise features and data residency, and integrate it cleanly so you could switch later.

Authorisation — what a signed-in user may do — is usually specific to your product and belongs in your code. We design a clear permission model and enforce it centrally on the server, never only in the user interface.

Passkeys and passwordless

Passkeys, based on the WebAuthn standard, let users sign in with a fingerprint, face or device PIN instead of a password. They resist phishing and remove the burden of password resets. Major platforms now support them, and we can add passkeys alongside existing login methods so users can adopt them gradually.

Authentication protocols explained

Identity projects involve a lot of acronyms. Understanding which protocol does what helps you choose the right integration for each application:

Designing roles and permissions that scale

Many applications start with “admin” and “user” and end up with dozens of special cases hard-coded into the logic. A clear permission model avoids that drift:

• Role-based access control (RBAC) groups permissions into roles such as editor, approver or billing manager. It is simple to understand and audit, and suits most business applications.
• Attribute-based access control (ABAC) evaluates rules on attributes — department, region, record owner, data sensitivity. It handles complex organisations but needs careful testing.
• Relationship-based access grants access through links between users and resources (owner of a project, member of a team), common in collaboration tools.

We usually recommend RBAC with a small number of attribute rules for ownership and tenancy. Whatever the model, permissions should be checked in one place on the server, be visible to administrators, and be covered by automated tests for every role.

Joiner, mover, leaver

Access problems often appear when people change roles or leave. Automating provisioning and de-provisioning from your HR system or directory — so accounts are created, adjusted and removed without manual tickets — closes one of the most common gaps found in audits.

Migrating users to a new identity provider

Moving an existing user base to a new identity platform needs care, because a forced password reset for every customer creates support load and churn. Common approaches are bulk import with existing password hashes where the target platform supports the hashing algorithm, or lazy migration, where each user is moved on their next successful login. We plan for edge cases — dormant accounts, duplicate emails, social logins — and run the old and new systems side by side until migration is complete.

Multi-tenant identity for SaaS products

B2B SaaS products have identity needs that consumer apps do not. Each customer organisation wants its own sign-in rules, its own administrators and often its own identity provider. We design tenant-aware identity so that:

• Each organisation can choose password, magic link, passkeys or enterprise SSO through SAML or OpenID Connect
• Users are created and removed automatically through SCIM provisioning from the customer’s directory
• Customer administrators manage their own users and roles without contacting your support team
• One person can belong to several organisations with different roles in each
• Domain verification routes users to the right sign-in method by their email address

Adding these capabilities is often what unlocks enterprise deals, because security questionnaires ask about SSO and automated de-provisioning early.

Authorisation models compared

Most products start with RBAC and add attributes or relationships where roles alone become unwieldy. We keep authorisation decisions in one place in the code so they can be audited and tested.

Identity security checklist

• Multi-factor authentication available to all users and enforced for administrators
• Rate limiting and lockout protection on sign-in and password reset
• Session lifetimes and refresh rules appropriate to the risk of the application
• Sign-in, permission changes and failed attempts written to an audit log
• Breached-password checks on registration and password change
• Regular access reviews for privileged accounts
• Tokens validated for issuer, audience, expiry and signature on every request

Common IAM mistakes

• Building login from scratch when a proven provider would be safer and cheaper
• Checking permissions only in the user interface instead of on the server
• Leaving former employees active because off-boarding is manual
• Granting broad administrator rights because fine-grained roles were never designed
• Long-lived API keys shared between people and systems

IAM work often goes hand in hand with application security and enterprise integration projects.

Related services

Part of cybersecurity engineering. IAM is essential for SaaS products selling to enterprises.

This page is part of Cybersecurity Engineering Services — see the full overview for related services, approach and pricing.