The identity governance and administration market combines identity management and identity governance to provide additional functionality beyond traditional access provisioning systems. IGA includes processes like role management, segregation of duties, logging, and access reviews.
These solutions allow IT teams to manage users’ identities and access to applications and data, protecting them from insider threats and reducing security risks.
Improved Security
Identity governance offers a centralized framework to streamline user onboarding and offboarding processes, access request management, granting and revoking privileges, and performing security audits. This improves security by preventing unauthorized and risky activities such as data breaches, unauthorized changes to critical systems, and unwarranted granting of access rights.
As organizations grow and acquire multiple systems, applications, and databases, implementing a centralized identity governance framework is essential for protecting sensitive information. IGA solutions provide a bird ’ s-eye view of all IT assets and applications in one place, so teams can keep tabs on how users access information to reduce the likelihood of a breach or unauthorized access.
Managing identities and access privileges in a complex IT landscape can be challenging for IT teams to accomplish manually. It can take time to provision new users, update existing ones, and perform access reviews and certifications. Carelessness in these tasks can lead to security risks and costly mistakes.
Achieving a balance between productivity and security is an ongoing challenge for IT teams. Identity governance helps to address this by providing users with prompt access to their required IT resources and empowering them to manage their passwords. This improves productivity and relieves IT teams of working passwords and other identity-related requests.
Enhanced Compliance
Identity governance and administration solutions offer a holistic approach to identity management and help reduce risk across disparate systems by establishing consistent business practices for password management, access requests, and review processes. This allows organizations to meet compliance standards set by regulations like SOX, HIPAA, and GDPR while reducing costs.
IGA systems can implement least privilege and separation of duties for user access to ensure that employees are granted only the minimum level of freedom required to do their jobs, limiting their exposure to risk and enhancing security posture. It also facilitates continuous monitoring of employee activities to identify potential breaches or policy violations and enables the rapid revocation of access when necessary.
When implementing identity governance and administration capabilities, it is essential to thoroughly assess the organization’s governance requirements to understand what processes must be aligned and what technology infrastructure needs to be addressed. This will allow for a more strategic and automated implementation of password management, provisioning, scalability, attestation, and access certifications.
It will also provide a clearer view of identity-related risks, a more substantial return on investment for the business, and an enabled workforce to keep digital transformation moving forward. For more information, download the full white paper. The whitepaper discusses why IGA is critical for businesses seeking to minimize risks, improve compliance, and enable their workforce.
Streamlined Operations
To maintain a balance between productivity – how quickly can someone get access to the resources they need – and security – should that person’s access change over time due to their role or project requirements – organizations must regularly assess, update, and manage identities and access privileges. This requires a well-defined and effective identity governance strategy incorporating the right processes and tools.
Implementing a robust IGA solution is essential to achieving your business goals. Our 100% SaaS solution builds a central data repository to store and synchronize user identity information across multiple systems, applications, and services. It then helps you streamline labor-intensive procedures such as access certifications, password management, and more to reduce your IT costs. In addition, it offers advanced analytics and reporting to help you identify suspicious access patterns and potential policy violations to mitigate security risks.
As you begin your IGA journey, remember to focus on the primary use cases that will drive success. Avoid tackling too many processes, as this can derail the entire project and prevent you from achieving the business results you’re hoping for. Instead, define your goals based on your need for an IGA solution: implementing a least-privilege approach, improving IT security, or streamlining IT operations.
Reduced Costs
Identity governance reduces the overall costs of operating your organization by automating labor-intensive procedures such as access certifications, access requests, password management, and provisioning. It also enables self-service for business applications and eliminates the need to call on IT staff to help users with these tasks. This frees IT resources to focus on higher-value tasks and reduces the risk of costly human errors.
An effective identity governance system ensures people have the proper job privileges, mitigating security risks and preventing data breaches. This requires implementing the best practices for monitoring and managing access to systems, data, applications, and services. This includes requiring proper security training and implementing automated tools that detect anomalous user behaviors that may indicate malicious intent or careless mistakes.
In addition, a robust identity governance approach should include an integrated suite of authentication methods, including mobile apps, password managers, self-service, telephone DTMF, voice biometrics, facial recognition, and touch ID. By enabling multiple authentication channels, organizations can further decrease their reliance on IT and increase employee satisfaction by making it easier for them to manage their passwords while still maintaining security standards.
In addition, a good identity governance solution should offer rich connectivity options to unify cloud and on-prem environments. This enables organizations to quickly maximize ROI by eliminating siloed, manual processes and reducing time spent on edge cases.