What Is Access Governance?

Access governance is a set of processes, policies, and technologies that organizations use to manage and control who has access to their systems, applications, and data. It is sometimes used to refer to as identity governance and administration (IGA), ensuring that only authorized individuals can access specific resources and that their access rights are appropriate to their roles within the organization.

The benefits of access governance are manifold. They include:

1. Enhanced Security. By controlling and monitoring privileged access governance, organizations can reduce the risk of data breaches and unauthorized access.
2. Regulatory Compliance. Access governance helps organizations meet regulatory requirements and cloud compliance standards by ensuring effective access control over sensitive data.
3. Operational Efficiency. Streamlines access management processes, reducing the burden on IT departments and ensuring users have the access they need without delays.
4. Risk Reduction. Identifies and mitigates risks related to user identity management and inappropriate access rights, reducing the organization’s on-premises and cloud security risk.

Understanding and adopting on-premises and cloud access governance as part of an overall identity governance framework can lead to better security compliance and more efficient business processes.

Understanding Access Governance

The key to understanding access governance is identifying its components and learning how they work together. These components include:

1. Access Control. Defines who can access what within an organization. This involves setting permissions and roles for users to ensure they can only access the resources necessary for their job functions.
2. Role-Based Access Control (RBAC). Assigns access rights based on user roles within the organization. Each role has a specific set of user permissions, and users are assigned to roles rather than individual permissions.
3. User Lifecycle Management. Manages user accounts throughout their lifecycle—from creation to termination. This includes provisioning (granting access) and de-provisioning (removing access) as users join, change roles, or leave the organization.
4. Access Reviews and Certification. Periodic reviews of access rights to ensure privileged account management. This helps compliance managers with privileged access security, reducing the risk of unauthorized access.
5. Policy Enforcement. Ensures that access controls align with organizational policies, industry regulations, and legal requirements. It involves enforcing privileged user management rules about who can access what and under what conditions.
6. Audit and Reporting. Provides transparency and accountability by maintaining logs and reports of access activities. This helps organizations monitor access patterns, detect anomalies, and provide evidence of compliance during audits.

Defining Access Governance

Access governance is a foundational infrastructure for managing user permissions, access controls, on-premises and cloud access governance and compliance.

How Does Access Governance Work?

The underlying framework and processes involved in access governance, including integration, authentication, authorization, and policy enforcement.

Integrating identity and access governance into an organization’s IT and security infrastructure involves aligning policies, processes, and technologies to manage and control access to resources effectively. This integration ensures that access governance is not just a standalone process but is embedded within the broader IT and security management framework.

User authentication confirms a user’s claimed identity in which a computer user is granted access only after successfully presenting credentials to an authentication mechanism.

Authentication mechanisms like single sign-on (SSO), multi-factor authentication (MFA), and biometric authentication ensure that users are who they claim to be before granting them access by requiring additional levels of proof as part of the User authentication process.

What Are the Key Functionalities Within Access Governance?

The principal elements and functionalities within access governance are cloud access governance, user access governance, privileged access governance, and policy enforcement.

As more organizations migrate their data, applications, and services to the cloud, ensuring that only authorized users have appropriate access to these resources becomes critical. Cloud access governance helps organizations maintain security, compliance, and operational efficiency in the cloud by extending traditional access governance practices to the cloud environment.

User access governance helps organizations set permissions and roles for users to ensure they can only access the resources necessary for their job functions. It also helps organizations satisfy regulatory standards, reduces the need for IT resources, and mitigates the risk of security breaches.

Privileged access governance grants users elevated permissions to perform critical tasks such as system administration, configuration changes, and access to sensitive data in a manner that maintains security, and compliance, and reduces the risk of insider threats.

Policy enforcement ensures that access control policies are consistently applied and adhered to across an organization’s IT environment. These policies define who can access what resources, under what conditions, and what actions they are permitted to perform. Effective policy enforcement is crucial for maintaining security, compliance, and operational integrity.

What Are the Benefits of Access Governance?

Access governance helps identity and access program managers ensure successful project execution, more easily implement new technology adoptions and operational change initiatives and enhance their on-premises and cloud security governance and compliance processes. It streamlines access management processes, reduces manual workload for IT and Line of Business (LOB) units, and helps senior stakeholders achieve faster time-to-value.

For IT infrastructure heads, access governance helps improve operational efficiency and integrates with existing infrastructure to drive the phasing out of legacy systems while maintaining continuity of infrastructure and operations. Access governance empowers business agility while maintaining access control and reducing help desk costs.

Access governance helps CISOs and CSOs minimize security risks by protecting customer data privacy and achieving and maintaining regulatory compliance.

Streamlining Access Management Processes

Access governance streamlines access management by centralizing identity-related data and processes. This reduces manual workload for access program managers and improves efficiency, in both on-premises and cloud identity management environments.

Minimizing Security Risks

Access governance enhances security by implementing robust authentication, authorization, and policy enforcement mechanisms. The integration of access governance with these mechanisms creates a robust framework that ensures secure and compliant access to resources. It aligns the identity verification process with access control policies, enhancing both security and user experience.

Eliminating Legacy Operations Costs

Modern access governance solutions deliver significant cost-saving benefits to organizations that adopt and implement them. These savings are realized most dramatically in the elimination of legacy access governance system costs. As legacy systems are phased out, organizations gain additional savings from reduced maintenance overhead costs and the capacity for improved scalability as new users, data, and applications are introduced to the IT infrastructure.

What Problems Does Access Governance Solve?

Fragmentation and Identity Silos

Access governance eases constraints on IGA solutions that are caused by fragmented identity silos across multiple clouds.

Security Threats

Implementing access governance infrastructure such as risk-based authentication, multi-factor authentication, and other strategies can reduce security threats like identity theft, unauthorized access, insider threats, and data breaches.

Complexity

Access governance unifies and simplifies the management of various identity access management (IAM) tools and systems across the organization to help streamline operations.

Scalability and Futureproofing

Access governance makes it easier for growing organizations to accommodate more users, devices, and applications and manage and control who has access without adding cost or complexity. Access governance can provide a flexible and adaptable framework that can evolve with new regulations and emerging security threats to ensure organization’s integrity and reputation.

What Is the Difference Between Access Governance and Identity Access Management?

Access governance and identity access management focus on distinct aspects of managing and controlling access to resources. Here is a breakdown of the differences.

Scope and Focus

Access governance is primarily concerned with the broader management, oversight, and compliance aspects of access control. It ensures that access rights are assigned in a way that complies with policies, regulations, and internal standards. The focus is on who has access to what resources, whether those access rights are appropriate, and how they align with organizational policies and compliance requirements. Access governance is more strategic; dealing with visibility, auditability, and ensuring that access rights are granted and reviewed in a controlled manner.

Identity access management is more operational and technical, dealing with the processes and tools used to create, manage, and authenticate digital identities, and to grant or revoke access to resources based on these identities. The focus of IAM is ensuring that only authorized users have access to systems and data, and that this access is granted based on a user’s role, attributes, or behavior. IAM is concerned with the day-to-day management of user identities and the enforcement of access controls for these identities.

Implementation and Tools

Access governance uses tools to define and enforce policies, conduct access reviews, and generate audit reports. This can include tools for role-based access control (RBAC), separation of duties (SoD), and access certification processes.

IAM manages user identities, ensures secure access through authentication mechanisms, and automate user lifecycle processes.

Goals and Outcomes

Access governance ensures access is compliant with internal and external regulations, reduces the risk of inappropriate access, and provides transparency and accountability through audits and certifications. It enhances security posture by reducing the risk of regulatory non-compliance and providing more effective access controls that align with business policies.

IAM ensures that the right people have the right access to the right resources at the right time, and that this access is secure, efficient, and scalable. It improves security through strong authentication and authorization processes, streamlined user access processes, and enhanced user experience with secure and seamless access to resources.

Access governance and IAM work together, with IAM as the operational foundation that enforces day-to-day identity and access controls. Access governance builds on this by providing oversight, ensuring that those controls are appropriate, compliant, and aligned with broader business goals.

IAM tools may enforce access based on rules and access governance tools help define and audit those rules, ensuring they are consistent with organizational policies and regulatory requirements. Both are essential for a comprehensive security strategy.