This article explains what IGA is and the benefits it offers. It also clears up some misconceptions about IGA and offers guidance about what to look for when assessing candidate IGA solutions.
What is Identity Governance and Administration?
Identity governance and administration (IGA) is a security discipline focused on helping organizations manage and monitor identities and their access rights. It is a core component of a comprehensive identity and access management (IAM) strategy.
Robust identity governance and administration requires a carefully designed set of policies, procedures and software solutions that work together. For example, a core element of IGA is ensuring accurate provisioning of users and their access privileges throughout the identity lifecycle, which typically involves a variety of identity-related tools and processes.
Benefits of IGA
An effective IGA identity governance strategy can provide a wide variety of benefits. In particular, organizations can achieve all of the following goals.
Strengthen Security
The rise of cloud-based technologies and remote work have made it more important than ever to properly govern digital identities. After all, every user account has access to valuable data, applications, and other IT resources — and those privileges can be misused by their owners or abused by adversaries who compromise the account.
IGA cyber security solutions reduce the attack surface at the identity layer. For example, by enabling organizations to rigorously enforce the principle of least privilege for all accounts, they help ensure that access requests are approved only for resources that users actually need to do their job. To further mitigate identity-related access risks, IGA ensures that unneeded accounts are promptly disabled or deleted.
Improve User and IT Team Productivity
Quality IGA solutions streamline and even automate many user access-related workflows, thereby improving the productivity of both business users and IT pros. For example, automated provisioning of user accounts removes a time-consuming task from the IT team while also enabling new employees to get started in their roles on day one. Similarly, self-service password reset functionality both reduces helpdesk call volume and enables users to get back to work quickly.
Empower and Secure the Modern Workforce
Effective IGA is essential to enabling today’s remote and remote workforce. Widespread adoption of cloud workloads has limited the effectiveness of traditional network-based defenses and made identity the new perimeter. With a robust IGA strategy, organizations can mitigate identity-related access risks and allow employees to work remotely without compromising their critical data and other resources.
Ensure Regulatory Compliance
Both older regulations like HIPAA, SOX and PCI DSS and more recent compliance mandates like the GDPR include requirements related to identity management. IGA security solutions offer a variety of capabilities to help organizations meet these compliance requirements, from accurate provisioning of access to regulated data across various systems, to thorough logging and reporting on all changes to identities and permissions.
Save Money
As noted earlier, streamlining tasks like account provisioning and password management can enhance user productivity and ease the burden on IT teams — which in turn benefits the organization’s bottom line. For instance, minimizing helpdesk call volume can mitigate the need to hire additional staff.
IGA delivers additional cost savings by improving security. The average cost of a data breach reached $4.45 million in 2023. IGA solutions help organizations reduce the risk of suffering a breach by addressing the most common cause — compromised user credentials. Plus, if an account is compromised, the damage can be less severe because access rights are strictly limited according to the principle of least privilege.
Misconceptions about IGA
Now, let’s debunk some common myths about identity and access governance.
Misconception 1: IGA software isn’t available for our applications.
There are many IGA cyber security products available today. Many of them deliver effective identity governance across both cloud-based and on-premises environments. As a result, they can help secure access to nearly any off-the-shelf or bespoke application.
Misconception 2: There’s no difference between IGA, IAM and PAM.
IGA vs IAM vs PAM is a common confusion that can easily be cleared up:
- IAM — A broader security discipline than IGA, identity and access management (IAM) covers all aspects of managing and monitoring identities, their privileges and their access activity.
- IGA — IGA is one element of IAM; it focuses specifically on governance of digital identities and their access rights.
- PAM — Like IGA, privileged access management (PAM) is a key element of a broader IAM strategy. PAM solutions help organizations manage and secure highly privileged accounts, such as those assigned to administrators.
Misconception 3. IGA isn’t necessary for our organization.
Every organization that uses digital resources needs to properly govern the identities that access those resources. Otherwise, the organization is at increased risk of costly data breaches, business disruptions and compliance violations.
Misconception 4: IGA doesn’t support HIPAA or other compliance requirements.
IGA is vital to compliance with virtually every industry standard and regulatory mandate, including HIPAA. After all, the core purpose of most regulations is to ensure that organizations closely manage who has access to sensitive data — in other words, to implement effective identity governance and administration.
Choosing the Right IGA Solutions
To deliver robust identity governance and identity administration, IGA tools should offer the following features:
- Easy and effective identity governance — An IGA solution should centralize your identity management processes, making them easier to monitor, analyze and report on. That simplifies data management workflows while enabling strong security and easier compliance.
- Enforcement of least-privileged access — IGA tools should make it easy to grant each user exactly the access rights they need to complete their work. To accomplish this goal, they often use role-based access control (RBAC).
- Automation — The best IGA solutions streamline and even automate recurring tasks such as account provisioning and password management. This automation improves accuracy and reliability while reducing the workload for IT team to deliver cost savings.
- Ease of use — IGA tools should simplify identity governance processes for both business users and IT pros.
Netwrix IGA Solution: Netwrix GroupID and Netwrix Usercube
The Netwrix IGA solution comprises two products that deliver all the features detailed above, and more.
Netwrix GroupID streamlines management of both groups and user accounts. For example, it empowers you to:
- Automatically provision and deprovision user accounts by syncing data from an authoritative source such as your HRIS platform
- Keep access rights up to date without error-prone manual work by defining queries that dynamically determine group membership based on users’ current attributes
- Enable users to securely reset their own passwords
Netwrix Usercube is an end-to-end solution for managing access rights as users join, exit and change roles in your organization. For instance, it enables you to:
- Automate account provisioning, reprovisioning and deprovisioning
- Put access review in the hands of the people who know who should have access to what
- Get notified about risky changes to permissions
- Prove compliance using an extensive set of customizable reports
Conclusion
A robust IGA strategy is essential for defending modern distributed IT ecosystems from an onslaught of sophisticated cyberattacks. Quality IGA tools enhance security and facilitate compliance by enabling you to accurately control what digital identities exist and what access rights they have, and they improve productivity by streamlining and automating tasks like provisioning and password management.
FAQ
What is identity governance and administration (IGA)?
IGA is a security discipline focused on management of digital identities and their access rights. A robust IGA strategy includes policies, procedures and tools that work together to improve security, compliance and productivity.
Why is identity governance and administration important?
IGA enables organizations to reduce their attack surface, automate workflows to enhance the productivity of business users and IT teams, and achieve and prove compliance with regulatory mandates and industry standards.
What is the difference between IGA and IAM?
A broader security discipline than IGA, identity and access management (IAM) covers all aspects of managing and monitoring identities, their privileges and their access activity. IGA is a core element of IAM that provides governance of digital identities and their access rights.
