Identity Governance and Administration refers to the increasingly integrated Identity Lifecycle Management and Access Governance markets. Today, there still are some organizations either looking at replacements of UAP and ILM or IAG, but most are opting for a comprehensive IGA solution to tackle risks originating from inefficient access governance features.

Identity Lifecycle Management remains a core IAM requirement, but Access Governance is becoming a more sought-after capability for organizations requiring better visibility of identity administration and access entitlements across its IT infrastructure. Governance offers from simple reporting and dashboarding to other advanced capabilities that include AI and/or machine learning techniques enabling pattern recognition to deliver valuable intelligence for process optimization, role design, automated reviews and anomaly detection. IGA concerns the capabilities in IAM market that broadly deal with end-to-end identity life-cycle management, access entitlements, workflow and policy management, role management, access certification, SoD risk analysis, reporting and access intelligence and also Access Intelligence for business-related insights to support effective decision making and potentially enhance governance.

Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) products support the consolidation of identity information across multiple repositories and systems of record such as HR and ERP systems in an organization's IT environment. The identity information including user accounts, associated access entitlements and other identity attributes are collected from across the connected target systems for correlation and management of individual identities, user groups as well as roles through a centralized administration console.

The IGA products are primarily aimed at supporting the following activities in an organization:

Traditional IGA deployments in most organizations have been facing many challenges ranging from complex implementations and lengthy product upgrade cycles to maintenance of overly customized IGA product and a lack of support for emerging functional requirements. The disconnect between business and IT security functions is another big reason for failed IGA deployments. In many organizations, IT security is primarily driven by the need to meet regulatory compliance, resulting in an undesired shift of IGA priorities from administrative efficiency and better risk management to auditing and reporting. Security leaders focused on IAM must ensure they are able to demonstrate the success of IGA deployments early-on with initial deployment phases to build the credibility and gather necessary consensus required to support IGA initiatives among the IAM stakeholder community.

Increased adoption of cloud-based identity stores and directories such as Microsoft Azure Active Directory (AAD) has created additional pressure on IGA tools to support Out-of-the-Box (OOB) integrations with cloud services based on industry specifications such as SCIM. Many IGA vendors are already offering ready integrations with Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) tools to offer support for mobile devices in an attempt to enhance user experience (UX) which has become an important differentiating criterion for organizations to evaluate an IGA product. Most IGA vendors have undergone a significant re-engineering effort to enhance their user and administrative interfaces but offering mobile support for critical IGA functions such as access certifications and request approvals is not on the priority list for many organizations because of the expected due diligence required to be carried out to complete these tasks. Inaccurate access certifications and uncertain access request approvals resulting from the inability of users to conduct appropriate due diligence on mobile devices can be disastrous to an organization's overall security posture in the long term. Many IAM and security leaders are therefore advocating against offering mobile support for such critical IGA functions to the business.

IGA integration with other enterprise systems such as IT Service Management (ITSM) tools as well as Privileged Access Management (PAM) tools have also become a norm in the industry and more than 80% of the IGA vendors in the market today either offer OOB integration or utilize the available APIs for the required integration. The integration with ITSM tools, particularly ServiceNow, is a popular approach for organizations wanting to consolidate IGA user functions (access requests, password management etc.) with other enterprise helpdesk functions under a common user interface (UI) or portal for IT related requests. ServiceNow APIs can be used to integrate with the IGA product in the background for request fulfilment on the target system.

Integration of IGA with PAM tools is another trend that we see picking up aggressively in certain industry verticals, particularly the ones that are heavily regulated. There are a few integration points observed, but the integration of IGA workflows for privileged access certification as well as role-based access of administrators to PAM system are amongst the ones delivering immediate credibility and business value to organization's IAM program.

There is an increased emphasis on integrating IGA tools with AI and Machine learning (ML) capabilities. Extending IGA tools functionality by integrating AI and ML can benefit by consuming the user's access activity such as authentication and authorization information across IT applications and systems to establish and continuously update user access patterns based on their role and peers' group. Similarly, DAG (Data Access Governance) tools can benefit from IGA integrations by consuming user identity and access entitlement information and in turn offer contextual information on device endpoint and data residing on the device and other sources to the IGA tools for better policy management.

Some IGA vendors have ramped up their efforts to align their product development roadmap with DevSecOps initiatives of organizations to support containerized deployments. With an increasing demand in the market for IAM Microservices delivery, a growing number of IGA functions will be grouped based on the functional objectives and usage patterns to be delivered as microservices.