What is Identity?
Identity in context
Identity helps us answer a basic question: who or what are we dealing with? In everyday life, the answer depends on context. You might be a customer, an employee, a student, or an account holder. You are the same person, but each relationship involves different information, expectations, and permissions.
Digital representations
Digital systems need a way to represent those relationships. A person might be represented by an employee record, a customer account, or a profile in an application. An application, device, or automated service can also have a digital identity. These representations typically include an identifier that distinguishes the subject within a system, along with attributes that describe it, such as a name, department, or account status.
The distinction between a subject and its digital representation matters. You are not your account. Your account represents you within a particular system, and you may have many accounts across different systems. An email address can help identify an account. A password or security key can help prove control of it. Neither, by itself, describes everything about who you are.
Identity and Access Management
Identity and Access Management (IAM) brings these pieces together. It covers how identities are established, represented, maintained, and eventually retired. It also addresses how people and systems authenticate, how access decisions are made and enforced, and how access changes when circumstances change.
Understanding identity means understanding those connections: the person or thing being represented, the information a system holds about it, the evidence that supports trust, and the access that follows.
These fundamentals introduce the pieces and how they fit together. Later lessons go deeper with code and worked examples: What a directory holds opens up directory records, the OAuth 2.0 lessons starting with The problem OAuth solves follow protocol messages one request at a time, and Evaluating a policy shows how an access policy reaches a decision.
Claims and evidence
Information stored about an identity is not automatically verified. Suppose you create an account and type your name, your birthday, and a job title. The system now holds those values, but all it knows is that you entered them. Each one is a claim: a statement about you that may or may not be true.
Before relying on a claim, a system needs evidence that supports it, and how much depends on what the claim is used for. A nickname shown next to your photos might need no checking at all. A job title that would give someone a manager's permissions is different. The system should confirm it with a source responsible for that information before acting on it.
Proceed to Establishing an identity to learn more.