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As an Identity Management platform, one of EmpowerID’s primary use cases is to present an accurate picture of the security within each IT system in an organization's on-premise and Cloud landscape. In order to do this, EmpowerID periodically inventories and pulls in the user account objects from these “external” or “managed” systems into the Account table. From here on out we'll refer to them simply as Accounts in order to avoid confusion and avoid the terms user accounts or user. Accounts are users from external systems and Person objects are the primary identity or user object for the EmpowerID system. External systems containing user accounts are known as “Account Stores” in EmpowerID terminology and will be referred to as such going forward.
We mentioned above that a key use case is to present an accurate picture of the access assigned to Accounts across an organization’s IT systems and if it is compliant with risk policies. What makes access “compliant”? Compliant access is appropriate to the person to whom it is assigned in compliance with the organizational standards and business policies to minimize risk. The key here is that the appropriateness of access in IT systems is based on who they are, what role do they perform in the organization, and other related information considered the business context of the person. In order to have a holistic view and analysis of this information, a Person’s Accounts cannot be analyzed and managed In isolation but must be linked together and viewed as a whole unit. It is for this purpose and for the management of their lifecycle (creation, modification, deletion) that they are linked and owned by a single Person object.
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The first thing many of you might ask yourself is, “yes, HR Accounts are always human people but what about the downstream systemsAccount Stores' technical or non-human accounts? Do I need a Person object for these?” The answer is not always clear-cut but rather a maybe or sometimes. You are not required to create a Person object for non-human accounts you wish you manage directly in EmpowerID (create, edit add/remove from groups, reset the password, disable, etc.)
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If the Account will login to use any of the EmpowerID applications, user interfaces, or REST APIs (e.g. PAM Application to Application, Bots, etc.)
If you would like to shop for access in the IT Shop for the Account
If the owner of the technical Account requires access to perform a self-service password reset for the password of the technical Account
If you would like to assign EmpowerID roles to the account so it receives policy-controlled access in downstream systems Account Stores (e.g. group membership). Group membership can still be managed directly for Accounts without a Person object.
If you would like attribute changes to flow between that Account and other related Accounts.
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Some situations require multiple Person objects for the same human being or non-human identity. A typical case is where a Person has privileged access to IT systemsin an Account Store. Privileged access is often granted by creating an additional personal privileged user account Account in the system Account Store for use by that person when performing admin activities. Using Active Directory as an example, this would mean that a Person would have two users Accounts in the same AD domain (Account Store). If EmpowerID were to link these two Account objects to the same person, some undesired consequences would occur. 1) EmpowerID flows attributes between all accounts Accounts owned by the Person and the rules are per directory Account Store and not per attribute. This would mean that the title, email, and other attributes would be made the same. 2) All access assignments by policy in EmpowerID are summed up on a Person by Person basis are and are not account specific. This means that is when a Person is granted membership in a group directly or by one of their roles, that all of the user accounts they own in that directory Account Store would be added to the group.
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