Introduction to User Management
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User management is a mechanism which involves defining and managing users, roles and their access levels in a system. A user management dashboard or console provides system administrators a holistic view of a system's active user sessions, their log-in statuses, the privileges of each user and their activity in the system, enabling the system administrators to make business-critical, real-time security decisions. A typical user management implementation involves a wide range of functionality such as adding/deleting users, controlling user activity through permissions, managing user roles, defining authentication policies, managing external user stores, manual/automatic log-out, resetting user passwords etc.
Any user management system has users, roles, user stores and user permissions as its basic components.
Users
Users are consumers who interact with your organizational applications, databases or any other systems. These users can be a person, a device or another application/program within or outside of the organization's network. Since these users interact with internal systems and access data, the need to define which user is allowed to do what is critical to most security-conscious organizations. This is how the concept of user management developed.
Permission
A permission is a 'delegation of authority' or a 'right' assigned to a user or a group of users to perform an action on a system. Permissions can be granted to or revoked from a user/user group/user role automatically or by a system administrator. For example, if a user has the permission to log-in to a system, then the permission to log-out is automatically implied without the need of granting it specifically.
User Roles
A user role is a consolidation of several permissions. Instead of associating permissions with a user, administrator can associate permissions with a user role and assign the role to users. User roles can be reused throughout the system and prevents the overhead of granting multiple permissions to each and every user individually.
User Store
A user store is a persistent storage where information of the users and/or user roles is stored. User information includes log-in name, password, fist name, last name, e-mail etc. It can be either file based or a database maintained within SP or externally to it. User stores used in SP differs based on the interface(IdP Client) used to interact with the user store. By default, a file based user store maintained in the <SP_HOME>/conf/<PROFILE>/deployment.yaml file interfaced through 'Local' IdP Client is enabled.