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The proper identity governance and administration (IGA) solution can help organizations keep workforces productive and secure. This article examines why IGA solutions are a top priority for today’s digital landscape.
IGA solutions include a central identity repository that is a single source of truth for all governance, administration, and provisioning processes. These solutions provide unified access control capabilities to support compliance and security goals.
Security
A robust identity governance and administration (IGA) solution ensures security through a framework of policies, attestation, monitoring, and reporting. It also supports the principle of least privilege by ensuring that users only have access to applications, data, and servers they need to do their job. It’s a critical unified identity security platform component and can be integrated with Privileged Access Management (PAM).
The top reason for using IGA is to enhance compliance by reducing internal risk. This is because threat actors often obtain user credentials through phishing or other social engineering activities, and their access to systems and information presents a significant risk to an organization. IGA solutions can detect such access and promptly revoke it, mitigating the impact of a data breach.
Another critical reason is enabling the workforce. This is because every organization must deal with people who are new to the company, moving between roles or projects, or leaving altogether. IGA can ensure that these workers have quick and straightforward access to the required materials, enhancing their productivity. IGA can also provide self-service capabilities that let users request and manage their profiles. This reduces the need for IT support and improves user experience.
IGA should be incorporated into a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy with a zero-trust model and continuous monitoring. You can shield your most important data from illegal access in this way.
Compliance
Regulatory compliance significantly drives organizations to implement identity governance and administration solutions. Due to strict data protection mandates, companies must ensure access controls are correctly in place to mitigate security risks. This is where IGA comes into play. IGA solutions streamline labor-intensive procedures such as access certifications, access requests, password management, and provisioning to minimize operational inefficiencies while enabling users to request access and manage their profiles autonomously.
This enables organizations to achieve productivity without compromising security or compliance standards. It also enables them to quickly address changing roles and responsibilities, helping them meet business application needs while upholding compliance and audit performance.
While identity management and identity governance have similar capabilities, IGA provides more strategic value by focusing on the lifecycle of user identities and their associated permissions, including provisioning, authentication, and authorization. In addition to reducing operational inefficiencies, IGA solutions enable users to self-service their profiles and passwords, which reduces the burden on IT support and increases overall productivity. Moreover, IGA solutions offer comprehensive reporting and analytical tools that provide actionable insights into the overall health of your identity environment. This enables you to detect and resolve problems before they become more serious.
Efficiency
When selecting an identity governance and administration solution, look for a scalable product that can quickly adapt to changing business needs. Avoid solutions that require manual processes and a lot of time spent on edge cases. Instead, find one that can provide a return on investment by quickly enabling the workforce and meeting compliance mandates.
Identity governance and administration solutions automate user provisioning, password management, policy management, and access certification. They also enable self-service capabilities that improve the user experience and increase productivity. This helps organizations reduce IT costs and minimize risks. Additionally, by ensuring that only authorized users have access to sensitive data and apps, these solutions assist enterprises in meeting compliance requirements.
As businesses become more agile and adopt various digital platforms, it’s essential to streamline security operations. However, this can create a significant amount of work for IT teams. Identity governance and administration solutions can help by providing visibility into user access across the enterprise, reducing compliance risk, and preventing security breaches. These solutions can also manage privileged access, critical to addressing security concerns around data loss and insider threats. This is achieved through a combination of least privilege best practices and automated entitlement analysis, augmented by artificial intelligence. This allows organizations to identify risky access and take the right action.
Cost
A robust identity governance and administration solution should enable companies to streamline onboarding, offboarding, provisioning, policy management, and access review through advanced automation capabilities. This helps reduce the cost of identity security and compliance while improving productivity and efficiency.
A comprehensive solution should also enable organizations to establish consistent business processes for password management, access review, and access requests. This enables organizations to establish repeatable practices that reduce the time and effort required for compliance with regulations. It also ensures consistency and facilitates auditability, making it easier to demonstrate compliance.
IG solutions should also include a centralized control framework for privileged access management. This enables organizations to implement least-privilege access to devices, applications, and servers to minimize risk while maintaining an easy-to-use user experience. It also helps to eliminate standing privileges that could expose the organization to potential data breaches.
As the digital landscape continues to evolve, organizations must strike a balance between productivity and security. With identity governance and administration (IGA) solutions, businesses can keep employees productive and protect their organizations from data breaches. However, it is essential to find a solution that can meet the needs of today’s complex environment and scale into the future. This is why it is essential to evaluate each vendor’s capabilities and select one that can meet the needs of your business.
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