Unlocking the Advantages of Identity Governance: A Comprehensive Exploration
You can’t control what happens in your organization without knowing who has what access. However, implementing a robust governance solution takes time and many skills.
Identity governance solutions automate tedious processes like access certifications, password management and access review. This reduces costs and provides the visibility needed to meet compliance requirements.
Improved Security
Identity governance can reduce security risks in many ways. For example, when a new hire’s job is assigned, an Identity Governance and Administration solution can automatically provision them with the right access to technology resources before their first day at work. This eliminates the need for manual processes to manage their IT account, which can lead to errors or unauthorized access. It also improves the visibility and review of privileged accounts to help identify risky behavior.
A comprehensive IGA platform can also automate labor-intensive processes, such as access requests, password management, and periodic certification, to save time and money. This helps strengthen internal controls and improves compliance and audit performance. Moreover, it enables you to leverage a zero-trust approach that gives users secure and trusted access regardless of where they work—even from home or on the road.
Growing digitization translates to more users, devices, and data spread across on-premises, multi-cloud, and remote environments. As a result, it can be not easy to manage user identities and access effectively in this complex environment. Unnecessary or excessive excess access to systems and apps erodes security and leaves your organization vulnerable to cyberattacks and data breaches. A comprehensive identity governance and administration solution can help you achieve a Zero Trust environment. It can provide a flexible access control model that meets your business needs without disrupting employee workflows or limiting productivity.
Reduced Risk
Security risks skyrocket with more users accessing more systems, applications and data. Unnecessary access privileges expose organizations to breaches and attacks, making meeting compliance standards like ISO 27001 and eIDAS (the European Union’s regulation on electronic identification, authentication and trust services) challenging.
Begin with an assessment of the specific identity governance requirements your organization needs – from regulatory compliance standards to internal best practices. This assessment will help you align your identity management and provisioning processes with the centralized visibility that governance solutions provide.
Identity governance tools bring centralized visibility to user access by aggregating and correlating data across on-premise and cloud systems, databases and application software. These solutions can then analyze this data to determine the types and levels of access granted to workers. Once these are identified, governance models can be implemented to set policies on who should have what and how that access is granted. For example, an approach that enforces least-privilege access within applications ensures employees are only given the minimum access required to do their jobs and that this access is regularly validated. Additionally, solutions that support just-in-time provisioning can eliminate standing privileges that grant permanent access to systems and data that are often vulnerable to attack.
Reduced Costs
In a hybrid enterprise with on-premises, cloud, and remote IT environments, identity governance is essential for ensuring centralized visibility into entitlements. Organizations are at risk of cyberattacks and data breaches without a clear understanding of who has access to what. Centralized visibility and a policy-based approach to granting access privileges mitigate these risks.
With identity governance solutions that automate provisioning, access requests, and certification processes, enterprises can save significant costs. Organizations can cut the IT resources needed to manage access by reducing the time spent on manual processes. This translates into reduced operating and capital expenditures for infrastructure and IT operations.
Another cost benefit of identity governance is the ability to reduce the number of non-people identities granted access. Many organizations need help with a proliferation of user accounts across applications and data files, which can cause serious security, compliance, and IT efficiency problems. Identity governance tools enable companies to reduce the number of non-people identities in their environment by removing unnecessary or obsolete access privileges, ensuring users are given only what is required for their roles and job functions.
Identity governance solution is a cloud-native governance platform combining powerful AI and machine learning with enterprise-grade security and compliance to ensure every identity has the appropriate access. This helps organizations automate account and entitlement provisioning, certify ongoing access, and enforce segregation of duties policies.
Enhanced Compliance
Privileged access management and securing user identity are critical business needs in a world of increasing digital transformation. Unnecessary access to applications, systems, and data increases security risks and exposes companies to potential breaches or compliance violations. This is especially true in organizations where multiple systems, remote workers, and BYOD manage corporate applications and data. In addition, many global regulatory compliance regulations such as SOX, HIPAA, and GDPR require tight control of users’ access privileges.
In these scenarios, identity governance is the key to managing access across the enterprise with centralized visibility, consistent business processes, and automated access reviews and approvals. These capabilities allow IT stakeholders to review and approve access confidently while mitigating risk and reducing cost and complexity.
A typical identity governance solution includes a centralized repository of identity data aggregating and correlating identity information from all company resources (on-premise and in the cloud). This unified data set enables centralized visibility, role, policy and risk models, and automation during provisioning, access requests, and password changes.
Identity governance solutions also enable organizations to audit and report on the status of access certifications automatically. This centralized access monitoring identifies users with unnecessary or excessive privileges and provides visibility into the root causes of these problems. In addition, access privileges are regularly evaluated using the principle of least privilege. They can be updated with just-in-time provisioning to eliminate standing privileges that grant permanent access and expose the organization to risk.