Identity, Credential, and Access Management

Overview
Identity, Credential, and Access Management (ICAM) is a U.S. federal government initiative to merge the management of digital identities (and associated attributes), credentials (including PKI, PIV, and other authentication tokens), and access control into one comprehensive management approach.

The benefits associated with implementation of ICAM are:


 * Increased security, which correlates directly to reduction in identity theft, data breaches, and trust violations. Specifically, ICAM closes security gaps in the areas of user identification and authentication, encryption of sensitive data, and logging and auditing.
 * Compliance with laws, regulations, and standards as well as resolution of issues highlighted in GAO reports of agency progress.
 * Improved interoperability, specifically between agencies using their PIV credentials along with other partners carrying PIV-interoperable or third party credentials that meet the requirements of the federal trust framework. Additional benefits include minimizing the number of credentials requiring lifecycle management.
 * Enhanced customer service, both within agencies and with their business partners and constituents. Facilitating secure, streamlined, and user-friendly transactions &mdash; including information sharing &mdash; translates directly into improved customer service scores, lower help desk costs, and increased consumer confidence in agency services.
 * Elimination of redundancy, both through agency consolidation of processes and workflow and the provision of government-wide services to support ICAM processes. This results in extensibility of the IT enterprise and reduction in the overall cost of security infrastructure.
 * Increase in protection of personally identifiable information (PII) by consolidating and securing identity data, which is accomplished by locating identity data, improving access controls, proliferating use of encryption, and automating provisioning processes.