With new data privacy and security regulations focusing on compliance, identity governance and administration (IGA) is mission-critical for enterprises. IGA encompasses processes, tools, and systems that determine a user’s access to information within applications.
Streamlining, providing, and removing access to information can improve efficiencies and reduce cyber risk. But how exactly do you implement this critical security measure?
What is IGA?
A robust IGA solution provides visibility into users, identities, and systems and automated processes that help cut costs, reduce threats, improve compliance, and boost productivity. These benefits allow enterprises to scale organically, something they can’t do with manual processes or reduced visibility into the identities and systems at their disposal.
Identity governance refers to processes and policies covering segregation of duties, role management, logging, access reviews, provisioning, and entitlement management.
As businesses grow and evolve, their identity needs change. This requires a robust IGA solution that can manage each user’s lifecycle from onboarding to offboarding and de-provisioning while keeping up with new roles, devices, locations, and applications. IGA is also responsible for ensuring that sensitive information remains secure while allowing employees the flexibility to work anywhere, anytime.
IGA helps companies meet regulatory compliance and industry mandates, such as GDPR and SOX. By enabling IGA policies to automate periodic access reviews and attestation, organizations can ensure that privileged accounts are only granted with the least privilege necessary and demonstrate their compliance posture to regulators.
Why Is IGA Important?
Identity governance and administration solutions are vital to an organization’s security strategy. They provide visibility into all employees’ identity and access privileges to mitigate cyber risk, meet compliance standards, and strengthen security posture. IGA processes and policies include segregation of duties, role management, logging, reporting, and access review. IGA solutions also provide centralized user provisioning processes, password management, and access certifications.
A strong IGA framework can ensure the proper access levels are given to users and revoked when needed. IGA helps to prevent data breaches by ensuring only the most necessary individuals have access to sensitive information. Granting and revoking system access can be automated and streamlined to keep IT teams from taking away more critical projects.
IGA solutions can also reduce security risks by providing a robust user access and activities audit trail. Having this type of information is valuable, especially in the case of breaches that occur due to phishing or other social engineering tactics. It’s crucial that the attacker’s identity is traced back to a specific user, and IGA solutions can make this possible. Using roles can also allow for more accurate and business-friendly access reviews and certifications. Roles are collections of access privileges typically grouped around a particular job function or title, making it easier to quickly identify and remove the right privileges in cases where they’re not being used.
How Is IGA Different from IAM?
While IGA and IAM go hand-in-hand and work together to ensure an organization’s identities are secure, they have some significant differences. IAM is primarily concerned with identity and access management, which involves managing user account privileges and ensuring that users are granted the right level of access to applications, systems, and data. IGA expands upon that by providing processes for governance, auditing, and certification of identity access.
IGA takes the identity management practices laid out in IAM and adds a layer of security, compliance, and business agility. The result is a solution that helps organizations mitigate identity-related risk effectively and efficiently across their entire network.
With hackers continuously targeting businesses for user credentials, implementing an IGA solution is vital to keep them out of your system and reduce risk. Even small organizations need to consider implementing an IGA process, as doing so can help them stay proactively compliant with regulations that would otherwise affect larger companies.
IGA solutions combine IAM, authentication, and authorization (PAM), and access governance to reduce the number of vulnerabilities attackers can exploit. This means that organizations can achieve greater visibility into their identities and privileges, streamline the provisioning of new and existing users, meet ever-increasing auditor demands, and manage access to applications and data for both third parties and employees in a more controlled way.
What Is IGA Designed to Do?
IGA enables organizations to manage user identities and access across the enterprise securely. It provides security administrators visibility into identities and access privileges and empowers them to reduce risky access by implementing strong identity governance policies. IGA also enables security administrators to automate workflows for onboarding and offboarding users, determining which roles require which level of access to systems and applications and managing user entitlements.
A good IGA solution can help businesses overhaul their security approach by reducing risks, strengthening compliance and audit performance, improving efficiencies, and streamlining business processes. It should support federated identities that link a single identity to multiple systems for secure, seamless, and convenient access to applications and information. It should also allow for automated workflows for user requests, certification, and attestation and centralized access rights management for both on-premises and cloud-based resources.
IGA should also enable enterprises to implement a role-based approach to identity governance. Roles are groups of access privileges based on jobs or job functions and can be defined ahead of time by security administrators. This helps organizations perform quicker, more accurate access reviews and certifications, making meeting industry compliance requirements such as those established by GDPR, SOX, HIPAA, and others easier. It should also provide built-in reporting capabilities to demonstrate that security compliance requirements are being met.
