Identity governance automates labor-intensive procedures like access certifications, requests, and password management. The framework also highlights anomalies and alerts IT, admins when access reviews are required.
Identity governance provides a single view of access across all applications and systems, which enables administrators to make the right decisions quickly. It reduces risk by eliminating excessive privileges and identifying segregation of duty issues.
Security
Governing access in this manner helps organizations meet compliance requirements and reduce security risks. It is especially true for regulated industries, such as financial services or health care, where regulations like HIPAA, SOX, and GDPR mandate strict access control policies.
A robust set of tools will be included in a good identity governance solution to manage the whole lifetime of user accounts, rights, and passwords. It includes integration connectors that read data from directories and enterprise systems to determine who has access to what, access reviews, account provisioning, and de-provisioning, segregation of duties policies, privileged account management, auditing, logging, and reporting.
IGA solutions can also help bolster security with the use of artificial intelligence to analyze patterns in logins and other activities, flagging potential issues and making it easier for IT teams to spot suspicious behavior. And by reducing stakeholders’ reliance on manual analysis, IGA can help ensure that decisions are made quickly and effectively.
With efficient access provisioning and self-service capabilities, IGA can help balance productivity and security, ensuring new employees get prompt access to the resources they need while adjusting access privileges as roles change over time. It helps to prevent unused accounts from sitting idle and being vulnerable to attack. A good IGA framework will enable organizations to monitor privileged access usage and terminate no-longer-needed accounts.
Compliance
IGA enables organizations to reduce the risk of data breaches and compliance penalties through automated processes that help ensure users have only the minimum access required for their roles and tasks. It also helps organizations meet regulatory demands for a comprehensive security posture. IGA also provides visibility into users’ identities, credentials, and privileges across all systems, helping to mitigate risks that may be introduced by unauthorized access.
Enhanced security through automation for user provisioning, deprovisioning, logging and auditing, access requests, access certifications, password management, and more. Streamlined workflows for faster, easier access to critical information. Reduced costs through reduced administrative overhead from automating manual processes. Better performance through increased accessibility to crucial applications on any device and from anywhere, boosting productivity and teamwork.
Increased compliance through a robust governance model that reduces the potential for human error. Centralized policies, automation, and visibility into all users and systems enable enterprises to scale organically and meet compliance requirements.
Privileged access governance is often seen as a separate capability from identity governance. Still, it should be an integral part of any IGA solution, given the potential damage that unauthorized access to administrator accounts can cause an organization. A strong privileged access governance program can be the difference between security and disaster. It can help mitigate threats by limiting access to sensitive information to only those needing it and enabling administrators to work securely from any location or device.
Automation
With the right IGA solution, automated processes help organizations reduce operational costs and ensure employees can access the needed data. IGA also helps mitigate risks by reducing excess privileges and helping ensure segregation of duties policies are enforced. The best IGA solutions combine least-privilege principles with organizational policy and identity lifecycle management, resulting in automated entitlement analysis that identifies unnecessary access to sensitive data and highlights points of concern for review and remediation.
For example, an IGA solution leverages the power of the ForgeRock Identity Cloud and advanced machine learning to enable a single view of user access and automate account and entitlement provisioning, onboarding, off-boarding, review and periodic certification processes, and termination of orphaned accounts. The solution frees IT staff to focus on more strategic projects by eliminating manual processes and leveraging more ingenious technology.
Another automation benefit of IGA is enabling users to manage their passwords with self-service capabilities that support the needs of mobile workforces and business user requests. IGA solutions can synchronize passwords across applications to reduce the risk of data breaches and help users reset their passwords when necessary. It enables companies to strike a balance between productivity, giving workers flexibility in how and where they work, and security, ensuring that systems are secure from attacks and that the rights of employees and customers are protected.
Flexibility
An effective identity governance solution provides centralized visibility into the current state of users across all networks, systems, and applications. Then, it uses best practices to manage access privileges based on the principle of least privilege, granting identities only the necessary data and resources they need to do their jobs. This approach reduces security risks and enables companies to comply with industry or internal regulatory mandates, such as SOX, HIPPA, or GDPR.
Ideally, IGA solutions incorporate the full range of identity management functions, including centralized provisioning and deprovisioning, identity analytics, segregation of duties, authentication and authorization, logging, and reporting. It includes a centralized identity repository (or directory), the single source of truth for user identities and attributes. IGA also supports unified policies, automated workflows, and simplified administration.
Finally, IGA helps organizations optimize business performance by enabling employees to work securely anywhere, on any device. This flexibility also improves productivity and reduces costs. With a robust IGA implementation, you can automatically grant day-one new hires access to critical business applications and provide seamless access requests and reviews for employees as they change departments or roles. It also enables secure remote access for contractors and partners while ensuring compliance with corporate policies. IGA also enables companies to respond quickly to breaches which can be costly, time-consuming, and damaging.