Identity management

I hear a lot about Identity Management and frameworks 开发者_开发问答offerring IDm. But what exactly is it? What are the differences when compared to PKI? Why are the companies providing IDM solutions so much in an advantage? Is it finally not something that almost everyone knowing about encryption that might provide such solutions?

You're talking apples and oranges here.

PKI is is a set of hardware, software, people, policies, and procedures needed to create, manage, distribute, use, store, and revoke digital certificates." (Wikipedia)

Identity management (or ID management, or simply IdM) is a broad administrative area that deals with identifying individuals in a system (such as a country, a network, or an organization) and controlling access to the resources in that system by placing restrictions on the established identities of the individuals. (Wikipedia)

IdM provides processes for Provisioning, deprovisioning, audit, access management, while considering the broader concepts of how to provide means of authentication and authorizations to IT and Physical systems.

In past provisioning projects, I have employed PKI both as a means of securing an IdM implementation as well as the provisioinng of X.509 certificates, Smart Cards an