What is a thing (Ding) in IAM?

A thing is a physical object that can be made reachable over a network and is uniquely identifiable within it by an identifier; things linked over a network form an Internet of Things, things can contain things, and a thing always belongs to an organisation or a natural person.

Synonyms: object, thing (IoT). Things are subjects too: a sensor authenticating to a broker goes through the same IAM processes as a person.

Go deeper:

• Internet of things (Wikipedia) — the things that increasingly need identities of their own.