How to Choose an IGA Investment Strategy that Drives Real Efficiency

The manual processes required for effective Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) have always been time-consuming, error-prone, and resource-intensive and these demands continue to intensify. In 2024, typical enterprise organizations use an average of 371 SaaS applications, a 32% increase over 2023. As organizations adopt more SaaS applications, the level of resources needed to provide safe and secure IGA is rapidly becoming unsustainable. The State of Identity Governance 2025 reveals that more than six in ten (61.2 %) IT professionals and business leaders cite time consuming manual processes as either the top or second-to-the-top issue driving their organization’s IGA investment.

Making a commitment to invest in IGA is an important first step, but to gain maximum benefit from the investment it is critical for organizations to choose a solution that automates IGA processes and can scale to ensure security and efficiency as they onboard new identities and SaaS applications going forward. In this post, we’ll explain why investing in legacy IGA tool modifications is not sustainable. You’ll learn about the benefits of investing in a modern IGA solution and gain insight into why it’s essential for organizations to modernize IGA processes to ensure successful adoption. Finally, you’ll see how the Omada Identity Cloud platform supports modern IGA implementation efforts and drives identity governance efficiency.

Traditional IGA Approaches Limit Efficiency

Legacy and in-house developed IGA tools were not built to make time consuming manual processes more efficient in the hybrid and multi-cloud environments that constitute a typical organization’s IT infrastructure. Principal reasons for this include:

More sophisticated attack vectors

In most cases, hackers don’t break in, they log in. It is much easier for hackers to steal a username and password than to break through perimeter security. Legacy and in-house developed IGA tools do not provide the functionality to stop attack vectors such as phishing, malware, and the exploitation of software vulnerabilities beyond on-premises IT infrastructures without significant development work.

Proliferation of machine identities

IGA solutions today must have the capabilities to manage human and machine identities such as servers, devices, applications, containers, bots, or other digital components. Legacy IGA tools cannot easily authenticate and validate interactions between machines and ensure that only trusted devices, services, or applications can access specific systems, services, or data.

Customization is costly

For legacy IGA tools to take on new challenges (e.g., enforcing identity governance policies in newly integrated SaaS applications), organizations must dedicate development resources to the project. Frequently, modifications are cumbersome and expensive.

No support for Generative AI

Generative AI is powered by deep learning techniques and helps create the intuitive interfaces, flexibility and adaptation capabilities that are foundational to mitigating identity-related cybersecurity risks in hybrid and cloud environments. Legacy IGA tools do not have the capacity to easily support this technology.

What Organizations Must Have from an IGA Platform to Ensure Efficiency

Connectivity and adaptability

A modern IGA solution must easily adapt to an organization’s existing IT infrastructure and other IAM tools to simplify IAM orchestration across hybrid and cloud environments.

Support for automation across core identity governance processes

Modern IGA drives efficiency by helping organizations automate models and functions including:

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)

The restriction of user access to resources across large, complex, and distributed IT environments based on the roles assigned to them within an organization.

Identity Lifecycle Management

The creation and assignment of human and machine identities and management of joiner, mover, and leaver processes in the IT infrastructure.

Segregation of Duties (SoD)

The facilitation of the division of tasks and responsibilities among multiple individuals to reduce the risk of error, fraud, or malicious activity.

Access Certification

Data gathering and streamlining reviews to reduce errors and increase efficiency.

AI Tools

AI-driven tools in a modern IGA platform are critical for efficiently managing permissions, access control, provisioning and deprovisioning across hybrid and cloud environments. AI-based features and functionalities that organizations should look for when evaluating IGA platforms include:

Intuitive chat-based natural language interfaces (NLP)

NLP makes access requests and approvals as simple as a chat conversation, reducing the need for training and accelerating user adoption of new IGA processes.

Role mining and role analysis

Centralized and simplified role management to identify access outliers, refine roles, and ensure each user has precisely the access they need for their job.

Adaptive learning

The IGA platform should enable the AI engine to learn new skills from instructions.

Automated configuration checks against best practices

Ability to provide on-demand reporting that satisfies and even exceeds the compliance safety nets within the IGA platform.

Scalability and adaptability

This helps organizations respond automatically to dynamic compliance requirements and real-time risk factors.

How Omada can help

Omada Identity Cloud accelerates efficiency in business processes by improving provisioning, making workflows seamless, and optimizing helpdesk capacity. A SaaS-based platform, Omada Identity Cloud centralizes user access management and simplifies administrative tasks to create greater operational efficiency. The platform ensures consistent and proactive management of access policies and roles across the organization, reducing the risk of human error and streamlining compliance efforts.

Omada Identity Cloud also leverages AI-driven automation and natural language processing, enabling seamless access requests and approvals directly within Microsoft Teams. This innovation enhances security, reduces human error, and improves operational efficiency.

The Omada Identity Cloud platform accelerates time-to-value, lowers costs, and empowers your team. Get a demo.