Our Services: Digital Identities

The Identity Management Team (IDMT) creates, updates, and stores the digital identities for every person, application, and computing device within the University of Michigan Health System (UMHS). We then make the information in these identities available to other people and computer systems that require it.

What Digital Identites Are:

A digital identity is a collection of data that uniquely describes a person or thing (otherwise known as an entity) and that contains information about that entity's relationship to other identities. Entities can be people, organizations, software programs, computers, or other things making request to access a resource.

Examples of resources include:

  • Web pages
  • A piece of data in a database
  • A file in a file system

What Digital Identities are Made Of:

Every digital identity is made up of attributes. Attributes are details about an identity that describe who or what that identity is. This makes it possible for that entity to prove to other entities that it is who it says it is.

Think of a digital identity as being like a driver's license. The attributes would be the specific bits of information on the card that enable the holder of the license to prove certain things: their age, their hair color, their eye color, and their address.

Where We Store Digital Identities:

We keep them where you would keep any valuable objects—a vault! Okay, it's not really an iron safe, but the overall concept is the same. The identity vault contains all of the identites for each entity in our system, complete with attributes. We then provide various methods by which our integrated systems can access these identities.

 

Last updated: 05/12/2006