For many businesses, growth is a top priority. Whether expanding into new markets or increasing the number of products offered, growth is often tied to increased profitability.
According to a study, achieving sustainable growth requires customer-centric leadership and clear capability strategies. A vital component of this strategy is effective governance.
Define a scalable span of control.
We all know how difficult it can be to keep control of access privileges – think about the kids at home streaming videos, downloading video games, and using other IT systems. Keeping up with all the various identities people use in your organization can be even more challenging. A well-designed IGA solution and IGA tools can help make this process easier by providing standard workflows, analytics, and intelligence to make it easy for your IT team to ensure that the correct level of access is given to each person.
Unlike Identity Management, which focuses on granting and revoking access privileges, Identity Governance zooms out to view the big picture. It ensures that your access policies align with your business objectives. It also helps you enforce those policies during provisioning, attestation, and password changes.
With data privacy a growing concern and regulatory compliance more critical than ever, it’s essential to have a solid framework to detect anomalies and notify managers when changes are required. An identity governance framework can automate these periodic reviews and attestation processes to ensure that the proper level of access is in place for every user.
IGA is an essential component of an overall Identity and Access Management (IAM) solution that provides the security, agility, and compliance businesses need today. IGA + PAM solution integrates to provide a comprehensive platform that can scale to billions of identities.
Automate user access reviews
User access reviews are a critical component of identity governance. They enable administrators to discover and manage access privileges while maintaining an accurate view of user entitlements across the enterprise. They help organizations maintain compliance with security and access policies by ensuring that users’ rights are only granted and maintained for legitimate business purposes.
In addition to enabling users to request access privileges, user access reviews can also automate granting and revoking these permissions. This can help organizations reduce their risk and improve efficiencies by decoupling access decisions from the IT department.
As the need to review access grows, many organizations are adopting an automated solution. These solutions offer significant time savings, improve the accuracy of user access reviews, and allow organizations to comply with regulatory requirements such as SOX, GDPR, GLBA, and ISO.
The best user access review automation tools are designed to support a scalable span of control, delegated administration, and role-based management. They should also provide the ability to track, schedule, and complete reviews. For example, an organization should be able to select a group of users for review and assign a reviewer. It should also be able to send email notifications and reminders to reviewers. This can help streamline the user access review process and prevent review fatigue. Additionally, an automated UAR tool should be able to detect changes in the access rights of users and notify administrators when those changes are necessary.
Enable delegated administration
Allowing delegated administrators to manage a group of user accounts or web applications may make sense, depending on the organization. This will enable IT to offload menial, repetitive tasks that do not threaten the security of your agency’s tenant, from your central IT team to the people who know best what needs to be done.
This is a significant shift away from the traditional model where every access request must be routed to and approved by IT. Instead, modern identity governance solutions enable business system owners (non-IT users responsible for the line of business associated with an application or system) to review and certify entitlement requests through workflows explicitly designed for them. These workflows also provide visibility to each request’s identity, entitlement, and risk information so that approvals aren’t rubber-stamped.
For example, if a marketing manager receives access to the HR system and does not have a reason for it, an identity governance framework can spotlight this abnormality. It can notify the business owner that a request has been submitted and allow them to review, approve, or revoke that access.
By enabling delegated administration, IT can be more efficient and focused on mission-critical activities that are more important to the agency, all while supporting compliance, reducing risk, and driving business growth. By assessing your organization’s specific requirements, you can create a framework that aligns these processes with identity governance to maximize the value of your investment in IGA.
Inheritance
Managing access at scale is tough enough; it’s even more challenging when organizations must ensure they can easily transition workers from one role to another. Identity governance frameworks enable inheritance, helping to mitigate security risk and improve efficiencies.
A vital component of an identity governance framework is a centralized identity repository that provides visibility into the current state of all user entitlements and permissions. This enables the IT team to understand how each worker is granted access to applications and systems based on their roles, allowing them to ensure that all entitlements are in line with business needs.
This central repository also enables a more efficient and scalable approach to performing user access reviews and certifications, as the IT team can instantly know each user’s current access privileges and how those rights have been assigned. The IT team can quickly review, expand, or revoke entitlements as needed and ensure all access aligns with business processes.
Finally, an identity governance solution should include a capability to govern privileged access, which is often not considered part of the governance and administration (IGA) function but critical to ensuring an organization can maintain its security posture. By governing privileged access, IGA helps to ensure that only those who need administrative privileges have them.
