The Importance of Identity Governance and Administration in Today’s Business Landscape 

As users gain access to organizational data across more applications, the need for governance and administration arose. This is where identity governance and administration (IGA) solutions step in.

IGA solutions provide centralized visibility and automated periodic access reviews that ensure compliance with SOX, HIPAA, GDPR, and more regulations. This helps to reduce risk and meet regulatory requirements without hindering productivity.

Risk Management

In a world of profound uncertainty and rapid change, businesses are constantly challenged to balance productivity and security. The stakes are high for companies that must manage risks related to their business models, employees, customers, data, reputation, and more. While some risks may be out of a company’s control, how it is managed can significantly impact its future.

One area where risk management can significantly impact is ensuring access privileges are used correctly. Identity governance and administration (IGA) solutions provide that individuals are given only the access they need to devices, servers, applications, and other IT resources. This can help reduce the risk of a security breach and improve compliance with regulatory requirements like GDPR or CCPA.

IGA also helps to streamline and automate labor-intensive processes like access certification, attestation, and password management, cutting operational costs. It also enables an organization to quickly and easily identify risks in its user access with dashboards, analytics, and reports.

The need for IGA is even more crucial in a world of hyper-connectivity, where users can access applications and data from anywhere at any time with different types of devices. IGA can ensure that access to these applications is secure and controlled, regardless of how many devices are being used by an individual.

Compliance

In economic uncertainty, corporate compliance becomes an even more critical business function. Recent scandals like the arrest of Harvey Weinstein, alleged sexual harassment and gender discrimination in the workplace, and other incidents have highlighted the need for corporate compliance to prevent illegal and damaging behavior.

In addition, the increasing digitization of the workplace means that employees are accessing more devices and systems. This creates additional security risks and increases the likelihood of a data breach or cyber-attack. Identity governance and administration solutions help to ensure that users only have access to the resources they need to do their jobs, minimizing these security risks.

A robust identity governance solution provides visibility into user identities, access privileges, and permissions and a centrally-managed process to grant or deny access to applications, systems, data, and other IT resources. This helps to ensure that users have the right level of access at all times and that organizations can demonstrate this oversight to auditors and insurers.

Integrated identity management solutions also automate labor-intensive processes such as access certifications, password management, and provisioning, which cuts operational costs and reduces the time needed for IT staff to manage these processes. With a business-friendly user interface, IGA solutions also empower users to request and manage their access and passwords, reducing the workload on IT teams.

Operational Efficiency

Identity governance and administration enables enterprises to streamline access management, mitigate risks and improve compliance by automating access certifications, access requests, password management, and provisioning. This automation reduces operational costs, makes responding to changing regulatory demands easier, and frees IT staff to focus on higher-value security tasks.

The key to maximizing the benefits of a strong identity governance and administration strategy is ensuring all stakeholders are involved. While this requires a considerable amount of time and effort, it helps ensure that the solutions in place work well together. It also allows teams to keep the focus on their core business and avoid losing sight of the big picture.

Once implemented, identity governance and administration tools should be monitored continuously to ensure they work correctly. The corporate climate, available technologies, and regulatory environment all change over time. Regular reviews help identify new risk areas and provide the opportunity to introduce improved functionality to address these concerns.

A strong identity governance and administration solution are crucial for any business that wants to minimize threats, boost productivity and ensure a secure environment. Companies that don’t have to comply with regulatory compliances must protect their user accounts and privileges from malicious actors. And they need efficient controls that make it easy for their staff to request, verify and manage access.

Security

Security is more critical than ever as organizations continue to grow and scale. IGA solutions help to ensure that users have access only to the applications, devices, and data they need for business productivity. IGA also helps protect against security threats, like data breaches, by implementing policies limiting unauthorized users’ access.

IGA solutions also help manage user passwords and other credentials with a role-based approach, simplifying reviewing, requesting, and approving access. This allows businesses to reduce costs associated with compliance-driven access certifications and improve overall efficiencies in the IT department.

In addition, IGA provides a seamless experience for IT and business users to request and manage their access across different applications and environments. This helps to alleviate the workload on IT teams and frees up time to focus on other business-critical initiatives. It also enables employees to confidently work remotely or from home, knowing their business-critical information is secure and accessible. A robust IGA solution can also provide a variety of self-service authentication methods, such as mobile apps, email, text messages, phone DTMF, touch ID, voice biometrics, and facial recognition. This allows workers to securely log in with the method that best meets their needs while helping to prevent unintended access to critical systems.