Identity Governance and Administration Enhances Security and Compliance

Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) ensures that only the right individuals within an organization have access to the data and applications that they need for work. IGA enables organizations to gain full transparency into who is accessing their applications, infrastructure and data, why and when they need access, and what they do with this access. In today’s cybersecurity landscape, especially with the rise of remote and hybrid working arrangements and organization-wide cloud integration, IGA is more important than ever.

As legacy identity governance systems reach end-of-life, are decommissioned, or are deprioritized, most organizations invest in a reliable and scalable modern SaaS-based IGA platform they can adapt to their dynamic IT environments with no need for additional staff or outside management. Before you can roll out a modern Identity Governance and Administration solution, however, you must understand what the essential components are of an IGA framework and learn how they come together to manage, secure, and enable user identities within an organization.

What is Identity Governance and Administration?

The two main components of IGA are Identity Governance and Identity Administration. Each play specific roles in monitoring and managing role-based access to files and resources. Both are critical to ensuring that only the people who need specific files and online resources for their roles can access them. An effective IGA solution greatly reduces the risk of security breaches that can compromise reputation and performance and create catastrophic threats to your organization.

Watch this short video to learn about modern identity governance:

What is Identity Governance?

Identity governance provides visibility across all applications and IT systems. It does so by managing entitlements and user access as the landscape grows more complex. Organizations that rely on old, outdated, or incomplete systems lack the centralized identity governance admin needed to pull data for various audit and compliance mandates. The result is an inability to act quickly on identified threats and ensure zero trust security for the organization.

Traditionally, organizations leveraged identity governance as a box-ticking exercise to satisfy audit and compliance requirements, and little more. Today, most organizations regard IGA as a strategic initiative. They know they must ensure secure access management without disrupting business operations.

What is Identity Administration?

Identity Administration manages user identities and their associated access rights within an organization, ensuring that people continuously have the permissions they need, when they need it, for the right reasons, and only for the time they need it.

The key components of Identity Administration include:

• User provisioning and deprovisioning
• Automating access requests and approval workflows
• Password management, lifecycle management, and directory management
• Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)

Reap the Benefits of IGA

IGA solutions help to lessen the burden on Identity and Access Management (IAM) teams, IT, security, and the Help Desk by automating processes. This automation reduces the risk of human errors and administrator overheads across all departments, from HR to Finance to outsourced third-party contractors.

Without an IGA solution, managing access rights is complex, costly and often leads to mistakes that either create security risks from too much access being granted to an identity, or stifle productivity by limiting access to workers. Strong identity governance helps by automatically provisioning access to identities from day one, and by deprovisioning access when someone moves roles or leaves the organization—continuously right-sizing access every step of the way.

Your organization can deploy Omada Identity Cloud, a full featured identity governance administration solution that can scale easily to satisfy your growing requirements. Organizations deploying Omada Identity Cloud can expect the following benefits:

Increased Security

• Implement least privilege access and zero-trust security principles to reduce risk and ensure only the right user identities have access to your data when they need it
• Automatically deprovision access to identities when it is no longer needed, specifically as they change roles or leave your organization
• Reduce the risk of ransomware by minimizing the number of orphaned accounts that are easy targets for attackers to breach an organization’s perimeter
• Classify systems and assets based on risk
• Reconcile accounts to check deviations, uncover risks, and take immediate actions
• Set policies to implement Separation of Duties (SoD) to ensure no toxic combinations exist, and if they do, are quickly detected and resolved
• Schedule and easily run certification campaigns to ensure access is appropriate and required

Seamless Compliance

• Maintain full overview of all identity-related activities, compliance violations, documents, and logs with comprehensive compliance reporting, dashboards, and audit trails
• Confidently demonstrate compliance with regulatory and audit demands
• Maintain records of access rights as they evolve over time
• Present justifications for why access is granted to certain people
• Implement SoD to avoid toxic combinations of access rights
• Easily classify data and systems based on relevance to industry-specific compliance mandates
• Recertify that access is appropriate with scheduled certification surveys and campaigns

Enhanced Efficiency

• Support digital transformations by automating processes and augmenting decision-making across cloud, multi-cloud, and hybrid infrastructures
• Automate tasks like access certification, risk scoring, and provisioning to remove error-prone manual processes
• Minimize calls to the Help Desk for mundane tasks like password resets and access requests with automated workflows
• Right-size access whenever someone joins the organization, or changes roles to ensure productivity
• Integrate with access request and ITSM tools to enable quick, easy, and seamless access requests and reviews
• Align IGA processes with business functions and terminology for ease of use with a flexible data model
• Configure connectivity to business applications without requiring code or custom development
• Role modeling that is driven by analytics, mining, workflows and attestations within Omada’s flexible data model

Avoid Identity Governance & Administration Pitfalls

Identity Governance and Administration is a critical and strategic part of any IAM program. It is critical to work with a trusted partner to avoid negative outcomes related to:

• Security: As organizations struggle to secure their on-premises and cloud-based resources to meet strict identity and access requirements, a lack of adequate security can arise
• Compliance: Failure to comply with internal and external regulations due to organizations finding it difficult to enforce identity and access governance policies and perform mandatory automated procedures
• Efficiency: Maintaining efficiency as organizations struggle to ensure rapid implementation and secure onboarding of new digitized business processes, systems, and applications

Challenges in Identity Governance & Administration

Implementing modern IGA solutions can be challenging. Organizations must frequently contend with these issues:

• Complex IT environments: Legacy systems are often incompatible with modern IGA solutions. It is difficult to implement a unified identity management framework in an organization where there are many data silos in the existing IT environment.
• Organizational resistance: Employees frequently resist changing to accommodate new solutions, especially if changes disrupt existing workflows or the new system introduces cumbersome processes
• Short-term resource needs: Implementing and maintaining a new IGA solution may require more resources up-front such as time, budget, and skilled workers

Addressing Modern Challenges

Rapid adoption of SaaS-based applications and data in the cloud has made securely managing identities far more difficult. To ensure that you can apply your organization’s identity governance policies to hybrid and cloud environments, you should work with an experienced technology partner to take on these challenges. Here are some strategies to use:

• Leverage the automation capabilities of a modern IGA solution to streamline processes. Deploying an organization-wide framework reduces administrative and operational burdens
• Choose solutions that integrate easily with your current technology stack so you can keep the legacy systems that generate value while creating new efficiencies
• Make sure your new modern IGA solution can scale to provide Identity Governance and Identity Administration as organizational needs expand
• Engage key stakeholders early on to ensure buy-in and support
• Offer training, support, and clear communication with employees so that they better understand the new processes and technologies you are implementing
• Continuously monitor and regularly review your Identity Governance and Identity Administration processes to facilitate ongoing improvement as you adapt to new compliance requirements and the growing security threat landscape

What Functionalities do Identity Governance and Administration Solutions Provide?

While Identity Governance and Identity Administration both work together, each actively serves different functions within the overall IGA framework.

Identity Governance Functionalities

Identity Lifecycle Management

Manage identity access rights as employees, contractors, and others join the company, move departments or change roles, and leave the organization

Access Requests and Reviews

Enable seamless workflows for identities to request access to applications and data and facilitate efficient access review processes. Real-time access request management maintains user identity security and ensures compliance policies are not violated

Role, Policy, and Entitlements Management

Implement role-based and policy-based access control to easily provide access while aligning identity governance processes with business context

Identity Security Breach Prevention

Deploy policies and procedures to continuously detect anomalies and swiftly stop attackers in their tracks. Restore business operations once the threat has been dealt with

Access Governance

Verify who has access to what information, remove access that is no longer needed through continuous certification campaigns, and ensure that Separation of Duty (SoD) policies are properly enforced

Connectivity

Enable a fast and reliable way to configure connectivity for provisioning and deprovisioning access for all identities

Audit, Compliance, and Reporting

Support the creation and evaluation of business policies, rules and governance controls, and provide assurance to auditors and executive stakeholders that these security measures are enforced

Identity Administration Functionalities

Provisioning and Deprovisioning

Easily create, modify, and delete user accounts across various systems and applications

Password Management

Establish and enforce strong password policies within your organization, including self-service password resets

Authentication

Verify the identity of users before granting access to resources

Access Control Policies

Control what resources users can access based on their roles and responsibilities

Why Identity Governance & Administration Matters

IGA solutions make it easier for organizations to demonstrate compliance during audits by providing detailed audit trails and comprehensive reporting. This makes IGA even more important when contending with complex regulatory environments. Modern IGA solutions help organizations comply with regulatory standards such as:

• General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR): Although GDPR is an EU-based legislation, organizations worldwide dealing with EU customer data must still adhere to GDPR regulations
• Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX): Modern IGA solutions help organizations comply with strict internal controls and financial reporting standards like SOX by enhancing transparency to guard against accounting fraud
• Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA): Modern IGA solutions help organizations follow standards like HIPAA that protect confidential health information, such as an individual’s private medical records
• Regional privacy laws: In addition to country-specific regulations, many companies worldwide must also follow regional privacy laws that govern how they are allowed to use personal data. As these standards evolve, SaaS-based modern IGA solutions can automate the ability to demonstrate compliance

Examples Of Successful IGA Implementation

In 2020, the world’s third-largest bottler of Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling Company (CCHBC), successfully implemented modern IGA when they migrated from their legacy system to the Omada IGA solution.

Omada Identity Cloud enabled CCHBC to automate previously manual processes, reduce provisioning times by 80 percent, improve workplace efficiency, and drastically enhance security and proactive risk management.

As part of their digital transformation, DEKRA moved from an in-house developed access management solution to modern IGA with Omada. In a matter of weeks, DEKRA leveraged Omada’s best practice framework Process+ to streamline and automate their access request and approval process. The results were reductions in the number of users’ Help Desk calls and time needed for audit preparation.

The Future of IGA: Emerging Trends and Technologies

Modern IGA must adapt to meet dynamic security threats. Current and emerging trends provide a glimpse into what functionality modern IGA solutions must provide in the future. These trends include using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to enhance security and transparency in IGA. Here are some key IGA trends surfaced by Omada’s State of Identity Governance report:

• More than 61 percent of respondents put “adaptability to an organization’s requirements” as a “most important” feature in an IGA solution
• More than 42 percent prioritize the ability to handle complex identity workflows
• Nearly 56 percent look for a connectivity framework that supports any application and infrastructure
• About 41 percent choose interoperability and data sharing with all IAM tools as a priority IGA solution capability
• Enterprises are accelerating plans to leverage SaaS-based IGA with generative AI, fast import, adaptability and advanced connectivity
• To achieve higher performance levels, 86 percent of IT and business leaders surveyed say their organizations are more likely to choose a best-of-breed identity and access management (IAM) solution rather than a single vendor that may not offer robust capabilities across the board

Investing in Your Organization’s Future

When considering investing in a new IGA solution, it is important that organizations consider several factors in addition to cost:

Functionality

An IGA solution must ensure enhanced security and ease-of-use through automation. It must have a streamlined process for onloading and offloading new users to ensure new joiners can access all the IT resources they need from day one, and that no one has access to data who should not.

Scalability

It is not only necessary for your organization’s IGA solution to be able to support your current workforce, but it must have the capacity to expand as your organization expands. You must consider scalability and understand how your modern IGA will adapt to your organization’s future needs.

Integration

Your IGA solution must seamlessly integrate with your existing infrastructure. This means factoring in the IGA solution’s compatibility with current directory and HR systems and business applications, and factoring in how complex and time-consuming the integration process is. You need to know how much time will be required to train your team on the new solution.

Vendor Reputation

It is a good idea to look at how long a modern IGA solution vendor has been in the market. Read customer reviews and case studies to better understand others’ experiences working with a vendor before investing in their product. Check the level of support that competing vendors offer so that you know what to expect before making your decision.

IGA technologies are not just technological solutions for your organization, they are a long term, strategic investment. They offer enhanced security, streamlined operations compliance, automated regulatory compliance unadulterated by human errors, and a foundation for future growth and success.

Omada is the market leader in Identity Governance and Administration technology. We help organizations to seamlessly scale their operation while ensuring that all their security, compliance, and efficiency needs are met. Our flexible and future-proof IGA solutions are trusted by top enterprises and companies around the world.

Book a demo today to see how see how Omada Identity Cloud can take your organization to the next level with industry-leading IGA.