Professional Certificate in IAM Engineering

What you will be able to do

• Design an identity architecture around zero trust principles
• Implement and troubleshoot SAML and OpenID Connect federation correctly
• Engineer identity governance workflows, role mining and certification campaigns
• Secure privileged access with vaulting, just-in-time access and break-glass
• Govern machine identities, service accounts and secrets across cloud estates

What is inside

6 modules, 30 lessons. Each module ends in a graded quiz and most carry an assignment.

1. 01

   IAM Architecture and Zero Trust

   How to design an identity architecture instead of accumulating identity tools, why identity has become the control plane for a cloud-first business, what zero trust actually says in NIST Special Publication 800-207, how policy decision points and policy enforcement points divide the work, and how the identity fabric idea holds a hybrid and multi-cloud estate together. Taught through Vantage Retail Group, a retailer that hires 30,000 seasonal workers a year, runs franchise partners on their own systems, and moved almost everything to the cloud except the things it could not move.

   5 lessons · 15 quiz questions

2. 02

   Federation Engineering

   How to implement Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) and OpenID Connect (OIDC) correctly, what identity, access, and refresh tokens are each for, how a JSON Web Token is structured and why every field must be validated, how to pick the right OAuth 2.0 grant, how federation is misconfigured and abused, how to troubleshoot a broken trust methodically, and how to authorize application programming interfaces. Taught through Vantage Retail Group, a retailer running 30,000 seasonal workers, a franchise partner network, and a cloud-first application estate.

   5 lessons · 15 quiz questions

3. 03

   Identity Governance and Administration Engineering

   How an identity governance and administration (IGA) platform is actually built and run: the reference architecture, connectors to source and target systems, provisioning at scale with the System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM), the identity data model and its authoritative sources, workflow engineering for requests and approvals, role mining and the role lifecycle, and certification campaigns that survive real volume. Taught through Vantage Retail Group, a retailer that hires 30,000 seasonal workers a year, runs a network of franchise-operated stores, and lives in a cloud-first estate.

   5 lessons · 15 quiz questions

4. 04

   Privileged Access Management

   How to find the privileged accounts nobody documented, put their credentials under management, isolate and record the sessions they open, replace standing administrative rights with just-in-time access, and design break-glass procedures that still work at three in the morning. The module ends with the largest privileged population of all, the machine identities in applications, pipelines, and cloud platforms. Taught through Vantage Retail Group, a fictional retailer running 30,000 seasonal workers, a franchise partner network, and a cloud-first estate.

   5 lessons · 15 quiz questions

5. 05

   Cloud and Non-Human Identity

   Cloud turned identity into the control plane, and most of the identities in that plane are not people. This module teaches how permissions actually resolve inside the major cloud providers, how cross-account and workload access is designed and reviewed, how service accounts and secrets sprawl, why workload identity federation beats long-lived keys, how certificates and cryptographic keys are governed, and how to run identity across a sprawling software as a service estate. Taught through Vantage Retail Group, a retailer with 30,000 seasonal workers, franchise partners and a cloud-first estate.

   5 lessons · 15 quiz questions

6. 06

   Operating and Maturing the IAM Program

   How an identity and access management (IAM) program survives contact with reality: the operational load a real identity service carries, incident response when identities and sessions are compromised, the telemetry and detections that reveal identity attacks, the metrics that tell leadership the truth, and the maturity roadmap and business case that get the next phase funded. Taught through Vantage Retail Group, a retailer with 30,000 seasonal workers, a franchise partner network, and a cloud-first estate, and closed by the course capstone.

   5 lessons · 15 quiz questions · assignment