PIAM, CIAM, PAM, it's all IAM

During my career I noticed abbreviations are used all the time in IT.

When I started this blog it was all about SaaS, PaaS, IaaS and some other aaS-variants.

It quickly became all known as the cloud, another fancy marketing word for the internet.

First people got headaches on finding out what all those different aaS-variants meant and then suddenly they were confronted with a new word: the cloud.

People, it's all marketing mumbo jumbo, inventing new words for already existing phenomena.

Ok, the internet as it is known now, is more complicated and interactive (especially mobile) than in the beginning, but it's still the internet, the digital highway.

It's all IAM

Why I am saying this?

Recently a infosecurity peer of mine, Andre Koot from Nixu (great guy and company!), shared on LinkedIn an article about PIAM with the remark: 'IAM, CIAM, PAM, now introducing PIAM... '.

That triggered my engagement, and especially when I saw the domain the article was posted on: securitysales.com. 

Aha, another new abbreviation and it's published on a sales-site.

PIAM is like CIAM just a way of Identity and Access Management (IAM), embodied in a product to sell. Nothing more, nothing less.

Just like the cloud, nothing more than internet.

IAM, CIAM, PIAM, keep cool!

So the next time you read: 'With this PIAM solution, by SaaS vendor X you can safely do IAM in the cloud', just keep cool and don't get worried that you do not know all the abbreviations in the sentence.