Identity governance is crucial for protecting your organization’s resources from unauthorized access. It also helps you comply with audits and regulatory requirements like SOX or HIPAA. IGA solutions can also help improve operational efficiency by enabling your IT team to automate onboarding, offboarding, policy updation, provisioning and rule application workflows. This saves your team time and effort, allowing them to focus on more vital tasks.
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Security
Identity governance (IGA) relates to managing identities in an organization. This includes provisioning enterprise identities and their associated credentials, granting access permissions and entitlements, and continually managing these processes as business and technology requirements change. This area is of considerable complexity and time-consuming manual work, especially if you have several users with several identities. These can range from internal Active Directory identities to Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and external cloud-based identities. In an organization, employees need appropriate access to the resources required to do their job. Whether this access is needed for work-related activities or using their mobile device to communicate with clients, the right people must have the right access at the right time. However, if this access is not managed correctly, it can cause security and compliance problems. This is a problem for organizations dealing with sensitive information, such as financial or health data, which requires stringent security measures to meet regulatory obligations.
Operational Efficiency
Identity governance enables organizations to mitigate identity-related threats, meet compliance and governance guidelines, and deliver operational efficiencies. These advantages allow firms to scale organically, which they couldn’t do with manual processes and limited visibility into users, identities, and systems. IGA solutions streamline core processes and systems related to user access, including password management, provisioning, certification, and access requests. The IGA solution will help industries obtain a strong cybersecurity strategy and operational efficiency. This reduces operating costs and saves time for IT teams, allowing them to focus on more critical areas.
Strong IGA solutions also enable companies to safely grant and manage remote access, maintaining business continuity and preventing breaches. This flexibility improves productivity and performance, freeing employees to work from anywhere. In addition, IGA solutions support centralized policies and automated workflows that lower operational costs, ensure workers have access to the resources they need, minimize threats, and boost compliance. This helps organizations scale organically, avoiding costly upgrades and minimizing risk. IGA solutions also automate recurring reviews, providing security reviewers with the information they need to make risk-based decisions about access. This can eliminate repetitive, tedious, and often expensive audits and forms.
Automation
The relevance of IGA governance in a business cybersecurity strategy is critical to ensure that all data and systems are secured against attacks. With phishing, data exfiltration, malware, and ransomware becoming more advanced, businesses face an increased risk of cybersecurity breaches. Automation of IGA processes is a key component in addressing these issues. Automated workflows for access requests and approvals enable employees to get the right system access they need to do their jobs, whether on-premises or in the cloud. These systems help organizations streamline user identity lifecycle management and reduce security and compliance risks while increasing productivity. They also allow IT administrators to easily provision users, de-provision them and change their access permissions. With an IGA solution, you can centralize data on users, their roles and their access permissions in a single database. This makes it easier for IT administrators to monitor and detect suspicious activities across the enterprise, allowing them to address potential threats before they cause harm to business operations.
Compliance
The relevance of IGA governance in a business cybersecurity strategy is that it enables security administrators to manage user identities and access across the enterprise efficiently. This enables them to improve visibility into identity and access privileges, implement the necessary controls to prevent inappropriate or risky access, and reduce security breaches and compliance violations. In addition, IGA solutions help IT teams meet regulations and standards such as GDPR, HIPAA, SOX, PCI DSS, and more. They streamline the process for review and verification of user access to different apps and resources, simplify access revocation (for example, when a user leaves), and ensure that policies are followed consistently. IGA also helps with privileged account management, a key factor in compliance across many standards and regulations. Privileged accounts often have elevated access to sensitive data and can be leveraged to bypass security systems or gain unapproved access to resources. The problem is that most organizations need help with identity management due to outdated or deficient tools and manual processes. These issues create significant security risks and weaken the compliance posture of businesses. Strong IGA solutions help companies to overcome these challenges and achieve better performance.
Business Impact
Identity security is a key pillar of business cybersecurity as new applications and data bring new identities, access rights and potential for attacks from state actors, hacktivists or malicious insiders. In an age where more and more applications and workloads move to cloud services, businesses need a more solid identity management strategy. This includes a more mature and robust approach to governance as more compliance demands arise. A solid IGA solution can help companies proactively meet regulatory mandates such as GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS and Sarbanes-Oxley Act. It can also help companies minimize operational costs as well as mitigate risk. To make the most of IGA, organizations must establish a clear business impact aligned with their key drivers. This will ensure a governance-focused approach that can deliver automation and higher operational efficiency.