1 Introduction
Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) refers to the increasingly integrated Identity Provisioning and Access Governance markets. Where Identity Provisioning focuses on tasks related to administering access fulfilment and entitlements throughout an identity lifecycle, Access Governance provides necessary (mostly self-service) tools for business to manage workflows and access entitlements, run reports, access certification campaigns and SoD (Segregation of Duties) checks. Access intelligence is the analytics layer above Identity Provisioning and Access Governance that offers business-related insights to support effective decision making and potentially enhance governance.
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 moves beyond simple reporting and dashboarding to offer advanced capabilities that include machine learning techniques enabling pattern recognition to deliver valuable intelligence for process optimization, role design, automated reviews and anomaly detection among other key capabilities.
IGA concerns the capabilities in IAM 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. As IGA becomes an important security risk and management discipline directly impacting the security posture of any organization, a lack of basic IGA capabilities can leave organizations exposed to risks originating from inefficient administration of identifies and access entitlements, poor role management and lack of adequate auditing and reporting. These risks range from identity thefts to unapproved and unauthorized changes, access creeps, role bloating, delays in access fulfilment, orphan roles and accounts, SoD conflicts leading to occupational and other internal frauds. Several incidents in recent past have emphasized the need to have better IGA controls for organizations of all sizes, across all industry verticals.
Those tools 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 integration with other enterprise systems such as IT Service Management (ITSM) tools as well as Privileged Access Management (PAM) tools have become in-demand in the industry. The integration with ITSM tools, is an 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.
There is also an increased emphasis on integrating IGA tools with DAG (Data Access Governance) tools depending on the drivers and business value expected of such integrations. Some vendors offer additional components or a separate edition to deliver that functionality.
