With a never-ending deluge of data security threats in cyberspace, businesses must constantly seek ways to better secure their digital assets. Modern authentication and identity management tools are heavily promoted as a simple way to fight back against data breaches in the field of enterprise IT, but the difference between these two technology concepts might not be obvious. At first glance, authentication and identity management sound as if they describe the same thing, but one is a subset of the other. Let's look at the meaning of identity management vs. authentication as well as other related terminologies. We'll then move on to look at the differences between authentication and identity management and how they overlap.