An IT hybrid blends public cloud workloads and infrastructure with on-premises workloads and infrastructure, allowing businesses to take advantage of the best of both deployment models. While such distributed paradigm provides IT more flexibility and agility, it may also expose to security flaws if not properly designed. A comprehensive-designed hybrid cloud IAM can address this by:
-    Allowing your company to adopt an effective IT hybrid approach that has abilities to identify people and provide them with the correct amount of access to the right resources at the right time even your resources become scattered across several clouds and on-premises data centers. 
-    Allowing your business in providing seamless user access across multi-channel apps operating throughout your cloud and on-premise infrastructures. 
   With the flexibility and agility, hybrid IAM is a compatible approach to assist your business in safely and easily migrating and adopting cloud technology for your application modernization in the long run.

   Data security is one of the top challenges for cloud migration. The security risks would arise in case of when enterprises lose visibility into their IT infrastructure after putting their trust in a cloud services provider. 
   Considering a comprehensive Cloud IAM solution before migrating to the cloud does provide a solid and secure basis for scaling your cloud services in the future. This also allows your security posture and cloud services can easily keep up with your organization's growth in the coming years.
 

   Cloud IAM can be used to control access to a collection of cloud services which are arranged into resource groups to allow users to access many resources at once within your account. Here are the features of a Cloud IAM solution to enable such safe user controls:
•    Single-panel Control: Cloud IAM provides a uniform and clear access control interface for all cloud platform services, which means all cloud services can be accessed using a single interface.
•    Augmented Security: You can specify higher levels of protection for important applications.
•    Resource-level Access Control: You can establish roles and grant access privileged to resources at various granularity levels.

   Adopting a well-planned cloud IAM solution as part of your cloud migration strategy will help you both to maintain IT security postures and user experience. Specifically, it ensures that:
•    Users can use your services from any place and any device.
•    As integrating IAM with SSO, you can accelerate your IT productivity and your app-user adoption.
•    Your sensitive data and apps are protected by using Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) as additional defense layers to your critical resources.
•    Regulatory compliance is maintained and demonstrated with regular audits.
•    Less spend on IT security by relying on the centralized trust mechanism to manage Identity Management across third-party partners and internal apps.

   SSO (Single Sign-On) is an authentication solution that allows users to safely log in to numerous apps and websites with only one set of credentials. As integrated with your Cloud IAM, SSO can help you in:
-    Strengthened security and compliance maintained: Because users use a single set of credentials to log in once per day, SSO decreases the number of attack surfaces. Moreover, it makes use of a central directory to regulate user access to resources on a more detailed level.
-    Enhanced user experience: Customers can enjoy a seamless digital experience without having to log in multiple times. 
-    Reduced IT costs: For having many passwords increases the likelihood of forgetting them, SSO lowers IT help desk costs by reducing the number of required passwords to just one.

   Authentication is the process of determining and verifying who users are. After an identity has been authenticated to a system, authorization controls what that identity may access.
   A key object of cloud security is the integration of a centralized identity, authentication, and authorization. For instance, it ensures that only authorized staffs have access to the systems for their tasks that are typically relevant to their roles in the organizations. Moreover, such integration enables the auditing of system modifications and the tracing of such changes to specific individuals. In Cloud IAM system, provisioning authentication, authorization, entitlements is essential in protecting sensitive corporate systems, assets, and information from unauthorized access or use.

   Open standards or open-standard identity protocols are frequently used to send authorization messages between trusted partners. These aid in achieving compatibility across authentication and authorization solutions from various vendors.  OpenID Connect, SAML, Web Services Trust (WS-Trust), and WS-Federation, as well as OAuth, are some examples of IAM open-standard identity protocols that allow third-party services like Facebook to access a user's account information without revealing the password. 
   These identity management protocols provide security standards to help comply with a wide range of regulatory requirements and industry standards and develop a standardized framework in addressing user-system interactions.