EmpowerID RBAC Architecture Overview

RBAC, known in most Identity Management solutions as Role-Based Access Control, is a framework designed to allow organizations to more efficiently manage permissions across applications and other protected IT resources. As such, the RBAC model attempts to mirror real-world organizational structure by recognizing that most individuals within organizations perform tasks against resources related to the function or job title they hold within that organization, accessing resources in a behavior-specific way, and that more than one can have the same role. For example, an organization could have hundreds or even thousands of employees classified as Standard Employees, with each needing to access the same common IT resources in the same way. As can be imagined, managing permissions for each person falling into this role can quickly become a time-consuming task prone to error, oversight, and mismanagement. Simply put, maintaining the appropriate level of access to resources for each individual when dealing with large numbers of people is impractical, unwieldy, and from a security standpoint, dangerous. By using RBAC, an organization can create a single role, Standard Employee, define how that role is to behave in an IT environment, and then place all standard employees into that Standard Employee role. In this way, permissions management is reduced from the many to the one.