Next week, we will be at IDM UK, speaking with attendees about what modern Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) means to us, and why more and more organizations are choosing to deploy IGA as a Service. The IDM event has a great agenda, and we are slotted to speak at 9:25 local time on June 15th. This series of keynotes and presentations are geared towards helping attendees understand how to build more secure, trustworthy, and reliable IAM programs.
Emergence of Cloud-First Strategies
When looking at the history of IGA, and how it fits into wider cyber security strategies, first it is important to note that solutions in this space have traditionally been deployed on-site with a view to managing on-prem systems. However, as digital transformation and ‘cloud first’ strategies continue to accelerate, organizations start to ask the question, ‘if critical applications and services are in the cloud why isn’t our IGA solution?’. Recent research from Enterprise Strategy Group shows that 52% of organizations are reevaluating their stance towards IGA as a direct result of the accelerated transformation in the past 2 years. Further, of those organizations that reviewed their IGA strategies, 66% chose to adopt a cloud-based IGA solution.
The reasons for this are similar to why any organization moves any solution to the cloud. It is all in the name of maximizing efficiencies and taking advantage of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) that removes the burden from having to manage on-premises infrastructure, perform lengthy upgrades, and the need for complex and costly customizations. With IGA, moving away from on-premises deployments can also unlock lots of other business benefits that come from enhanced speed and delivering faster ROI to the business. With identity projects being notorious for overrunning, looking at deployment time is increasingly top of mind for many.
Benefits of IGA as a Service
Time to value is another critical barrier to entry for an organization looking to kick start an IGA program. As business and cybersecurity requirements rapidly change, it can be easy for businesses to think that they need bespoke solutions and processes to fit their unique needs. However, this often results in overly customized IGA solutions that slow business operations and increase ownership costs. This is where having a repeatable, standards-driven implementation approach is key. Think of an organization that may have built out a home-grown IGA solution at a specific point in time based on requirements of the day, whether they were facing an audit, responding to a breach, or just looking to sharpen up efficiencies of the workforce. Things can and do rapidly change, and having a legacy, on-premise IGA solution can lead to lost productivity and gaping security holes as the workforce proliferates, goes remote, and people join, move around or leave organizations.
Full-featured IGA as a Service allows organizations to maintain robust identity lifecycle management, access governance, implement role-based and/or policy-based access control, and audit capabilities as well as on-premises counterparts, but with the added benefits of deploying quickly and scaling elastically. Without a clear plan to deploy and scale the capabilities of IGA, the frustrations of on-premises or homegrown solutions can quickly snowball. While each organization should do what is right for them, we see time and time again that moving IGA to the cloud can have massive benefits in terms of security, efficiency, and compliance.
Join us at IDM UK, where we’ll share our views of what you should expect from a modern IGA solution, including why it must be simple, scalable and agile, and show how our customers are securing their organization’s identities with successful Cloud Identity Management implementations that are delivering rapid value and low total cost of ownership.
Before the event, be sure to check out the Omada Identity Cloud Accelerator, our best-practice approach to deploying IGA as a Service within 12 weeks.
