Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) is at the heart of the IT operations center, enabling and securing digital identities for all users, applications, and data. It allows the company to provide autonomous access to technology assets while managing potential risk and compliance.
IGA helps organizations address complex business objectives by balancing four critical goals:
- Reduce operational costs
- Reduce risk and strengthen security
- Increase regulatory compliance and accelerate audit cycles
- Streamline business initiatives
Reduce Operational Costs
Identity Management and Governance automates labor-intensive processes such as access reviews, access requests, password management, and account and permission provisioning, dramatically decreasing operational costs.
IT staff must have user-friendly interfaces that significantly reduce the time they spend on administrative tasks.
Users must be empowered for self-service in requesting access, managing passwords, and reviewing access.
Access to dashboards and analytical tools gives organizations the necessary information and metrics to understand and continually improve their identity program.
Reduce Risk and Strengthen Security
Compromised identities due to weak, stolen, or default user credentials are a growing threat to organizations.
Centralized visibility creates a single authoritative view of “who has access to what,” allowing authorized users to quickly detect inappropriate access, policy violations, or weak controls that put organizations at risk.
Identity governance solutions enable IT and business users to identify at-risk user populations, policy violations, and inappropriate access privileges, and to correct these risk factors.
Increase Regulatory Compliance and Accelerate Audit Cycles
Identity Management and Governance allows organizations to verify that adequate controls have been implemented to meet the security and privacy requirements of regulations such as SOX, HIPAA, GDPR, among others. They provide consistent business processes for managing passwords, as well as for reviewing, requesting, and approving access, all supported by a common policy, role, and risk model.
With role-based access control, companies significantly reduce the cost of compliance, while managing risk and establishing repeatable practices to achieve more consistent, auditable, and manageable access certification efforts.
Streamline Business Initiatives
Digital Transformation allows companies to approach their business model innovatively, enabling them to streamline initiatives such as launching new products, entering new markets, or even acquiring other companies. Identity Governance and Management is at the heart of Digital Transformation. Identity information feeds into security and IT management programs, allowing business initiatives to be executed with the confidence of having controlled attack surfaces.