Choosing the Right IGA Solution: Questions to Include in Your RFP

The race to protect data, meet audit demands, and keep users productive has turned Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) into a top priority. Every department—finance, HR, IT—depends on timely, secure access to applications and information. When that access is poorly managed, the risks multiply quickly. From accidental data leaks to full-blown compliance failures, an outdated IGA platform can become a serious liability.

In this article, we are exploring some of the essentials for selecting a modern IGA solution, framed around key strategic considerations to guide your RFP process. These insights can help your organization avoid common pitfalls and shape a long-term, value-driven identity strategy.

1. Clarity of Purpose: Aligning IGA with Business Drivers

Before comparing vendors, define the specific outcomes you want: fewer access bottlenecks, faster audits, automated provisioning, or perhaps a firm path toward least privilege. By doing so, you’ll narrow down the technologies that match your needs.

2. The Importance of Full-Featured IGA and SoD

Segregation of Duties (SoD) is the backbone of regulatory compliance. Imagine a finance system where one role (Accounts Payable Clerk) is granted the entitlement to create new vendor records while another role (Finance Manager) is allowed to approve payments to those vendors. If a single user ends up with both entitlements—creating vendors and approving payments—this conflicts with Segregation of Duties (SoD) principles. By separating these entitlements, the organization ensures that the same individual can’t both register a new vendor and immediately authorize payments, reducing the risk of fraudulent transactions.

While “Light IGA” solutions can handle basic identity lifecycle tasks they often struggle to deliver robust SoD enforcement. Compliance-driven organizations—particularly those in highly regulated sectors—benefit from full-featured platforms that can monitor, detect, and remediate SoD conflicts before they become audit nightmares.

Key question to ask vendors:

1. How do you detect SoD violations at scale, and can the system automatically remediate risky access assignments?

3. Accelerated Time-to-Value

Lengthy deployments used to be the norm, often taking a year (or more) for planning and customization. These projects were often highly complex, with many customizations and special cases being incorporated.

Cloud-native IGA solutions, like Omada Identity Cloud, break away from traditional lengthy deployment cycles by providing flexible, pre-configured workflows that significantly shorten rollout timelines. With built-in best-practice templates and a robust methodology through IdentityPROCESS+, organizations can efficiently streamline everything from user onboarding to compliance reporting, ensuring a smooth, cost-effective implementation path.

Look for solutions that come with deployment accelerators, fixed-cost packages, and proven customer stories illustrating swift returns.

4. Budgeting with a TCO Mindset

Licenses costs alone don’t tell the full story. Ask about recurring fees, integration expenses, costs for essential features like custom reporting, and how upgrades are handled. While an on-premises deployment may seem cost-effective initially, hidden infrastructure and maintenance costs can accumulate over time. In contrast, cloud-based IGA platforms typically include updates, support, and the ability to scale without the need for additional hardware or a large professional services team, providing a more predictable and cost-efficient long-term investment.

5. Reinforcing Security and Compliance

Beyond identity provisioning, a future-ready IGA tool complements existing security measures. The platform should integrate with tools like SIEM or SOAR to pull in real-time risk signals, enabling automated decisions based on an up-to-date security posture. Granular audit logs and reporting capabilities also matter—especially if you’re operating within frameworks such as ISO/IEC 27001 or NIST CSF—frameworks that now play an even more prominent role in the regulatory landscape.

6. Harnessing AI for Intelligent Governance

Older identity platforms often depend on static policies that must be defined using proprietary scripting languages like JavaScript, Java, or even Beanshell. For example, legacy IGA solutions frequently use .NET-based templates, Groovy, or Beanshell-based rules for advanced provisioning workflows, customization and policy logic, and provisioning tasks. While these approaches can offer flexibility, they also create significant manual complexity, increasing the overhead and making them a nightmare to maintain as systems evolve over time.

Modern IGA takes a more dynamic route by integrating AI and ML to detect anomalous user behavior, automatically refine role privileges, and even suggest updates during access reviews. This proactive stance drastically reduces the labor involved in quarterly certifications and ongoing audits, helping organizations maintain a leaner, more responsive security posture.

7. Building an Identity-Centric Security Fabric

No matter how robust your IGA platform is, it won’t reach its full potential if it operates in a silo. Identity needs to be woven into your entire security stack, sharing insights with endpoint protection, network monitoring, and threat intelligence systems. Look for platforms that adhere to frameworks like the Shared Signals Framework (SSF), allowing continuous exchange of risk indicators for adaptive access control.

Plotting Your IGA Journey

Choosing an IGA solution is about more than just picking a tool—it’s about partnering with a vendor capable of evolving alongside your regulatory, security, and digital transformation goals. Prioritize solutions that:

1. Provide a holistic SoD control framework
2. Deploy quickly without exorbitant customization requiring esoteric scripting skills
3. Leverage AI for smarter security decisions
4. Integrate seamlessly with your existing infrastructure

Omada Identity Cloud addresses these challenges head-on, offering a scalable, cloud-native IGA platform that supports compliance, facilitates Zero Trust, and cuts through complexity. Explore the full Omada RFP Guide to gain clarity on the critical questions to ask and ensure you’re selecting a solution that truly meets your organization’s needs.