Glossary

Authorization Object — A group that represents a specific access assignment in an application or directory system.The group can either be a security group in Active Directory or a generic group in EmpowerID that represents a group or role in a target application.

Authorization Package/Business Function — Management Roles are used to represent Authorization Packages (AKA Business Functions) in EmpowerID. An Authorization Package is a business-designed bundle of access required to complete a Business Function or for participation in a team or working group. Authorization packages bundle access across multiple systems and present a single non-technical assignable unit of access. The Management Role allows this flexibility and enables the business owners to create friendly non-technical descriptions and manage the governance cycle of these packages.

Core Identity — Single entity per human or IoT. A core identity can be the owner of multiple person objects.

Person — A Person is an object in EmpowerID that represents a human being. A Person typically owns multiple user accounts in external systems such as Active Directory, Azure AD, Facebook, SAP, etc. 

Personas — A person's core identity can be linked to multiple sub-person objects which are the professional identities (i.e. have the business information attached).

Accounts — Accounts are users that are inventoried from external systems and may or may not have a single person assigned as the owner.Accounts such as service identities can be managed but do not always require a person object for management. Often a person object will be created anyway to leverage the ease of assigning RBAC policies for group membership and other access. Accountsin Social Media systems or web applications are linked to a person to facilitate single sign-on between systems.

OrgRole — An OrgRole is an object in EmpowerID that represents a person's Business Role. Business Roles are always assigned to people in conjunction with an Organizational Location.

OrgZone — An OrgZone is an Organizational Location / Business Context always assigned in conjunction with a Business Role. For resources that are not Person objects, Locations are used to organize them into hierarchies for management of inherited access policies.

Polyarchical RBAC — Business Roles and Locations are both hierarchical trees. People are assigned to one or more Business Roles each for a specific Location/Context. This polyarchy dramatically reduces the number of roles and eliminates role bloat.

Company — People belong to companies via their Business Role and Location assignments.

EmpowerID RBAC Actor Types — Objects representing collections of people to which policies can be assigned. These include: Person, Group, Management Role Definition, Management Role, Query-Based Collection, Business Role and Location.

Management Role — Management Roles are user-defined containers holding collections of Access Levels that have been packaged together into responsibility or job-based bundles to allow for the quick and easy bulk assignment of access to resources from across multiple systems.They are like groups in EmpowerID that are not limited to granting access to only the resources in a single system. Management Roles have a single level hierarchy, inheriting access from their Management Role Definition.

Access Levels — Access Levels are bundles of EmpowerID operations and/or native system rights specific to a resource type (such as Exchange mailboxes or user accounts) that when assigned to users give those users the ability to access IT resources in the manner specified by the Access Level. Each resource type has its own set of Access Levels defined with different combinations of EmpowerID operations and rights (where applicable) to ensure that the level of access to the resources remains consistent for the type and the assignment.

EmpowerID Operations —  Each EmpowerID Operation is a protected code object that when executed within an EmpowerID workflow allows a resource within EmpowerID or a custom application to be accessed in a way that is consistent with the operation and the type of resource being accessed. Some examples include adding users to groups, creating mailboxes, updating user attributes or even viewing certain objects such as EmpowerID pages and reports.

Query-Based Collections —  Query-based Collections, also known as Set Groups, are logical bundles of Sets (queries made against the EmpowerID Identity Warehouse that result in collections of people or resources) grouped together with a friendly name for resource management. Set Groups offer advantages over groups and roles in that they can contain any type of resources, are continuously evaluated to ensure they contain the appropriate resources, and can be used as actors as well as be the recipients of EmpowerID policies for provisioning, deprovisioning, attribute assignment, password policies, etc.