Glossary

Identity Incident Response

Identity incident response preserves evidence, validates risk signals, contains accounts, credentials, tokens, sessions, devices, grants, and roles, and verifies recovery across downstream resources.

Identity Lifecycle

The full arc of an identity from creation to removal, joining, moving (role changes), and leaving, during which access must be provisioned, adjusted, and revoked so it always matches the person's current legitimate needs.

Identity Outlier Detection

An identity-governance analytic that finds identities whose access is unusual compared to their peers, flagging people with more or different entitlements than similar roles, a strong signal of excessive or inappropriate access.

Identity Propagation

Identity propagation carries necessary subject, actor, tenant, and delegation context across a call chain without allowing intermediaries to gain unintended authority.

Identity Protection (Risk-Based Sign-In)

Risk-based sign-in protection evaluates identity, session, device, network, and threat signals to estimate the risk of an authentication or user account.

Identity Provider

A service that authenticates users and shares identity information with applications.

Identity Provisioning

Creating and granting access to identities, setting up accounts and assigning the right entitlements when someone joins or needs new access, ideally automated so access is timely, accurate, and based on role.

Identity Risk Score Limitations

Identity risk score limitations are the hidden weighting, calibration, data-quality, population, model-version, and uncertainty issues in a composite number.

Identity Risk Scoring

Assigning each identity a risk score based on factors like its access, behavior, anomalies, and policy conflicts, so governance and detection can prioritize the riskiest identities for review, monitoring, or remediation.

Identity Source of Truth

The authoritative system that holds the definitive record of identities, often an HR system for people, from which other systems derive accounts and access, so identity data stays consistent and lifecycle changes propagate reliably.

Identity Store

An identity store holds identity objects and attributes used by authentication, authorization, provisioning, and audit processes.

Identity Synchronization

Keeping identity data consistent across multiple systems by propagating changes from an authoritative source, so that creating, updating, or disabling an identity in one place is reflected everywhere it matters.

Identity Telemetry

The activity data generated by identity systems, sign-ins, authentication results, privilege changes, access grants, and federation events, that feeds detection, hunting, and investigation of identity-based threats.

Identity Telemetry Coverage

The measured availability and quality of required authentication, session, privilege, recovery, service-identity, and policy-decision events.

Identity Threat Hunting

Identity threat hunting searches authentication, session, token, application, directory, privilege, device, and resource evidence for suspicious identity use.

Identity and Actor Modeling

Identity and actor modeling describes human, service, device, tenant, partner, provider, anonymous, insider, compromised, and automated subjects and how they are authenticated, authorized, delegated, elevated, recovered, revoked, and audited.

Identity-Aware Proxy

An identity-aware proxy evaluates authenticated identity and contextual signals before forwarding requests to a protected application.

Identity-Centric ZTA

A zero-trust architecture that treats identity as the primary control point, making strong authentication and continuous, context-aware authorization of identities the foundation of access decisions rather than network location.

Image Hardening

Configuring a VM or container image to a secure, minimal state, removing unnecessary packages and services, applying secure settings, and patching, so every workload launched from it starts hardened rather than from an insecure default.

Image Pipeline

The automated process that builds, hardens, scans, and publishes VM or container images, so images are produced consistently and securely from source to a trusted registry rather than assembled ad hoc.

Image Scanning

Examining VM or container images for vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, secrets, and malware before deployment, so insecure images are caught early, a foundational cloud security practice.

Image Security

From the cloud engineer's view, the overall practice of keeping container and VM images secure across their lifecycle, building from trusted sources, hardening, scanning, signing, and controlling registries, so workloads start from trustworthy images.

Image Security Pipeline

A build-and-delivery pipeline with security stages woven in, building, hardening, scanning, signing, and gating images, so security is enforced automatically as images move from source to deployment.

Image Signing

Cryptographically signing container or VM images so their integrity and origin can be verified before deployment, ensuring an image has not been tampered with and came from a trusted source.

Immediate Safeguard Decision

An immediate safeguard decision selects an authorized action that rapidly reduces ongoing harm while considering evidence preservation, service impact, reversibility, and delegated authority.

Immutable Backups

Recovery copies protected from modification or deletion for a defined retention period through controls such as object lock or write-once storage, with governance and restoration still required.

Immutable Identity Matching

Immutable identity matching correlates records with a stable, unique identifier that is not changed by renaming, email updates, department moves, or ordinary administration.

Immutable Image References

Immutable image references identify container content by a cryptographic digest rather than relying only on a movable tag.

Impact

The harm that could happen if a threat successfully exploits a weakness.

Impact Analysis

Impact analysis evaluates operational, financial, safety, legal, privacy, customer, strategic, and recovery consequences while separating plausible, expected, and observed effects.

Impact Estimation

Judging how much harm a risk would cause if it materialized, financial loss, operational disruption, reputational or legal damage, so risks can be prioritized by consequence alongside their likelihood.