How can you manage identities and their access in Vault?

Managing identities and their access in HashiCorp Vault is effectively accomplished through the Identity secrets engine. This engine specifically focuses on enabling the management of users and their roles in a centralized manner, allowing for the handling of both identities and related metadata. It supports features such as groups and aliases, which help in organizing and structuring access for users according to their roles or responsibilities, significantly enhancing access management.

The Identity secrets engine enables administrators to define users, group memberships, and policy mappings efficiently. This centralized orchestration allows for improved identity governance and easier management of user permissions across different systems integrated with Vault.

Other options, while they touch on aspects of access management, do not encompass the full scope of identity management within Vault. Access Control Lists (ACLs), for example, provide a way to enforce permissions but do not directly manage identities. Policy documents serve as a means to define what actions can be performed on resources but lack the comprehensive identity features offered by the Identity secrets engine. Assigning roles directly to users can be handled through certain APIs but does not encapsulate the more robust identity and access management capabilities that the Identity secrets engine provides. Therefore, using the Identity secrets engine is the most effective method for managing identities and their corresponding access in Vault.