With centralized policies and automated processes, strong IGA solutions reduce costs, ensure workers have access to the data they need to be productive, minimize threats, and boost compliance. They also help identify and eliminate risk areas like over-permissioned access that attackers can exploit to gain entry into systems and steal sensitive information.
Enhanced Security
Identity governance and administration (IGA) solutions offer a strong foundation for effective security practices when protecting sensitive information from cyber threats and data breaches. They help improve visibility into identities and access privileges, ensure compliance with regulatory requirements, and mitigate risks through automated processes for requesting, granting, and reviewing access.
IGA tools enable organizations to connect to users through federated identity and manage the full range of user lifecycles, from onboarding and offboarding to password management, access request processing, and granting/revoking permissions for applications and systems. They also support automation for provisioning and de-provisioning, self-service portals, workflows, and access reviews. Connectors allow IGA tools to read from directories and other enterprise systems that contain data about users, their role associations, the applications they’re authorized to use, and how their permissions are assigned.
In addition, IGA solutions enable organizations to establish access certification and review mechanisms, aligning with security policies, business objectives, and compliance requirements such as GDPR, SOX, HIPAA or PCI DSS. This ensures access is appropriate and secure, strengthening an organization’s defenses against insider threats, cyber-attacks, and other vulnerabilities.
Increased Efficiency
Managing access to systems and applications is complicated and gets even more complex as users grow and change roles. Using IGA tools streamlines processes and automates tasks (like onboarding new employees and adjusting access as they leave) to improve efficiency for IT and security teams.
An IGA solution also helps ensure that security policies like segregation of duties, role management, attestation, and analytics are properly executed and enforced across the enterprise. This minimizes human error, strengthens security, and supports compliance with industry standards and regulations.
Greater Visibility into Entitlements
Identity governance has evolved as an offshoot of Identity Access Management (IAM). It adds a layer of processes and tools for segregating duties, role management, logging, access reviews, and analytics. These capabilities boost security by ensuring centralized visibility of all users and their permissions on applications and data.
This is a great way to reduce risk and ensure compliance with regulatory mandates such as GDPR, SOX, HIPAA, and PCI DSS. It also helps avoid hefty data breach fines by establishing strong controls and preventing unauthorized access.
Using an IGA solution with a policy-based approach is key for enterprises looking to maximize security. Incorporating it into existing workflows can help organizations decide who should get what and when. Organizations can easily set policies to approve or deny requests for access and revoke credentials if necessary. This can reduce the number of privileged accounts left unattended, which bad actors target for exploiting and compromising systems. By automating the process, businesses can save time and improve efficiency.
Improved Compliance
Strong identity governance and administration practices are essential to ensure that the right people have access to critical systems, data, and resources. It also helps businesses mitigate risks and ensure compliance with industry regulations, government standards, and corporate policies.
IGA solutions are used by IT security and risk management teams to streamline user provisioning, password management, policy management, and access reviews. These capabilities and other unified Identity Security platform components, like Privileged Access Management (PAM) and Identity Management (IAM), allow organizations to strengthen security, simplify processes, and improve visibility into users’ entitlements.
IGA tools automate labor-intensive operations like access certifications and reviews, reducing costs and allowing IT professionals to focus on more pressing business needs. They also enable employees to work from anywhere confidently while reducing the risk of data breaches and other threats. This way, companies can stay flexible and agile while improving productivity and performance.
Increased Productivity
Managing access for human and non-human identities across all IT systems and applications, on-premises or in the cloud, can be complex and time-consuming. IGA solutions streamline and automate labor-intensive processes while delivering centralized visibility into user identities, roles, entitlements, and permissions.
This enables organizations to meet regulatory mandates such as SOX or GDPR by enforcing policies and auditing processes for compliance reporting. IGA solutions also help reduce the risk of insider threats by removing unnecessary privileges from accounts.
With automated, self-service capabilities, IGA solutions enable users to request and receive the right access privileges to the resources they need to work efficiently. This helps ensure the workforce can do their jobs without being stifled by slow manual processes. IGA solutions also allow organizations to safely remove excess access from people when they change or leave roles. This ensures that business continuity is maintained and helps organizations avoid costly risks from security incidents or regulatory violations. Ultimately, IGA solutions help to lower operational costs, boost productivity, and enable growth.
