Help Center/ Identity and Access Management/ User Guide (Kuala Lumpur Region)/ FAQs/ Project Management/ What Are the Differences Between IAM and Enterprise Management?
Updated on 2024-07-26 GMT+08:00
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What Are the Differences Between IAM and Enterprise Management?

Enterprise Management enables enterprises to manage cloud resources by project and organization level. It includes enterprise project and personnel management. IAM is an identity management service that provides identity authentication, permissions management, and access control.

You can use both IAM and Enterprise Management to manage users and access permissions. Enterprise Management supports more fine-grained authorization for resource usage. It is recommended for medium- and large-sized enterprises. For more information about Enterprise Management, see Enterprise Management User Guide.

Differences Between IAM and Enterprise Management

  • Enabling method
    • IAM is free of charge and you can use it immediately after you register with the cloud platform.
    • Enterprise Management is a resource management service on the cloud platform. After registering with the system, you can use Enterprise Management free of charge..
  • Resource isolation
    • Using IAM, you can create multiple projects in a region to isolate resources, and authorize users to access resources in specific projects. For details, see "Projects" in the Identity and Access Management User Guide.
    • Using Enterprise Management, you can create enterprise projects to isolate resources across regions. Enterprise Management makes it easy for you to assign permissions for specific cloud resources. For example, you can add an Elastic Cloud Server (ECS) to an enterprise project, and assign permissions to a user for managing the ECS in the project. The user then can manage only this ECS.

Authentication Process

When a user initiates an access request, the system authenticates the request based on the actions in the policies attached to the group to which the user belongs. The following figure shows the authentication process.

Figure 1 Request authentication process
  1. A user initiates an access request.
  2. The system searches for IAM project permissions and then searches for matched actions in the permissions.
  3. If a matched Allow or Deny action is found, the system returns an authentication result (Allow or Deny). Then the authentication is completed.
  4. If no matched actions are found in IAM project permissions, the system continues to search for enterprise project permissions and matched actions.
  5. If a matched Allow or Deny action is found, the system returns an authentication result (Allow or Deny). Then the authentication is completed.
  6. If no matched actions are found, the system returns a Deny. Then the authentication is completed.
Parent topic: Project Management