Preface

Identity Management is a Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based way to create a security, identity, and authentication domain. The different security and authentication protocols available to Linux and Unix systems (like Kerberos, NIS, DNS, PAM, and sudo) are complex, unrelated, and difficult to manage coherently, especially when combined with different identity stores.

Identity Management provides a layer that unifies all of these disparate services and simplifies the administrative tasks for managing users, systems, and security. IPA breaks management down into two categories: identity and policy. It centralizes the functions of managing the users and entities within your IT environment (identity) and then provides a framework to define authentication and authorization for a global security framework and user-friendly tools like single sign-on (policy).