Certified Identity and Access Manager (CIAM) Practice Exam

The fundamental idea here is where user identity data lives across systems. That storage layer is the Identity Store—the repository that holds user identifiers, attributes, and credentials across databases, LDAP directories, Active Directory, and even text files. Authentication, by contrast, is about proving the user’s identity (for example, by validating credentials against the identity store or another source). Access management focuses on enforcing who can do what after authentication, based on policies. Federation deals with establishing trust and enabling single sign-on across different domains or organizations. So the underlying place that physically stores the user information across these technologies is the Identity Store.