Introduction to Identity Manager | RHEL Presents Ep. 65

After a bit of an identity crisis of my own on the livestream software, it felt fitting to talk about identity management. Brian Smith and I are joined by Nate Lager for an introduction to Red Hat Identity Manager, or IdM, the package that ships with RHEL to handle identity, permissions, and access across your systems. Nate brought a set of demos and framed the whole thing around the zero trust conversation that’s so hot in IT right now.

A few things worth carrying away from the conversation:

• IdM is essentially Active Directory for Linux. Nate’s high-level description stuck with me: it houses identity, permissions, access rights, even SSH keys, and your Linux systems reference it for all of that, not just RHEL.
• It ships with RHEL, so there’s nothing extra to buy to get started. Identity management is included in the subscription you already have, which lowers the barrier to standing up a real identity layer.
• Zero trust is more than a buzzword here. Rather than cringe at the term, Nate connected it to real standards around identity security and showed how IdM helps you actually implement those controls.

If you’re wrangling users and access across a fleet of Linux boxes, this is a solid starting point.