Access to the iSM Administration Console can be configured to use any authentication realm as an alternative to the built-in iSM security (or console realm). This allows the management of iSM console users to be integrated with existing security systems.

The authentication realm performs two tasks:

• Authenticate credentials of the user. This determines whether or not the user is allowed access to iSM. The iSM Administration Console uses the HTTP Basic Authentication scheme.
• Return the list of security roles assigned to the user.

A security role can be understood as a particular function that a user performs in iSM. The specific permissions that are necessary for this function are granted to the role, and the role is assigned to a user. To determine whether the user is authorized to do something in the iSM console, the system checks to see whether the user has a role with the required permissions. A user can be assigned multiple roles, since the permissions assigned to these roles are cumulative.