Identity Governance Blog

What is Identity Governance

By Andrew Silberman, Product Marketing Director at Omada

To maintain security and meet compliance, businesses need full transparency into who is accessing their applications, infrastructure and data, why and when they need access, and what they do with this access. These are the foundational elements of any Identity and Access Management (IAM) initiative and are at the core of identity governance.

The need to manage, secure, and enable all identities has never been more complex or more essential. Watch this short video to learn about modern identity governance.

What is Identity Governance?

Identity governance, or as it is sometimes referred to, identity governance and administration (IGA), is a linchpin of IAM that allows enterprises to continuously monitor, manage, and administer access rights to a constantly evolving set of resources that live across cloud and hybrid environments. IGA provides visibility across all applications and IT systems by managing entitlements and access across the increasingly complex landscape. In relying on old, outdated, or incomplete systems, businesses are at risk of not being able to act quickly on identified risks or pull data for various audit and compliance mandates due to a lack of centralized visibility.

In years past, businesses would leverage identity governance to simply check a box to meet audit and compliance requirements and not much more. Today, IGA is frequently seen as a strategic initiative, and businesses know they not only need to be able to prove that each identity within the enterprise only has the right levels of access, but also to ensure that their access is secured without disrupting business operations. IGA ensures that people continuously have the right access that they need, when they need it, for the right reasons, and for only the time they need it.

Identity governance helps to automate processes to lessen the burden on IAM teams, IT, security, and the Help Desk. This automation helps reduce the risk of human errors and administrator overhead 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 result in security risks from too much access being granted to an identity, or provides too little access, which can stifle productivity. Strong identity governance helps by automatically provisioning access to identities on day 1, and by deprovisioning access when they move roles or leave the organization, and continuously right-sizes access every step of the way.

Avoid Identity Governance Pitfalls

Identity Governance is a critical and strategic part of any IAM program, but without a trusted partner, can lead to several common negative outcomes:

  • Security. Lack of adequate security as organizations struggle to secure their on-premises and cloud-based resources to meet strict identity and access requirements and avoid security breaches
  • Compliance. Non-compliance where organizations find it difficult to enforce identity and access governance policies and perform mandatory automated procedures to ensure they meet all internal and external regulatory compliance
  • Efficiency. Maintaining efficiency as organizations struggle to ensure rapid implementation and secure onboarding of new digitized business processes, systems, and application

More Than Just Technology

Identity Governance technology can solve a lot, but like any other enterprise-scale deployment, a project like this requires a large variety of skills to achieve a successful implementation. Implementation of an IGA solution involves and impacts a great number of departments across the entire organization, requires technical integration with many other software products, and involves a wide variety of stakeholders – both inside and outside the company.

Organizations need to ensure they have all the skills in place to succeed as there are potential pitfalls that need to be addressed including involving the right stakeholders, the lack of available best practices, being overly ambitious, and underestimating the importance of data quality.

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Identity Governance Framework

Reap the Benefits

With a full featured identity governance solution that is deployed and fit to scale, organizations can expect the following benefits:

Increased Security

  • Implement least privilege access to reduce risk and ensure only the right user identities have the right access to your data when they need it.
  • Automatically deprovision access to identities when it is no longer needed, namely as they change roles or leave the organization
  • Reduce the risk of ransomware by minimizing the number of orphaned accounts that are easy targets for attackers to use to breach the perimeter and move laterally and vertically
  • Classify systems and assets based on risk
  • Reconcile accounts to check deviations, uncover risk, and take immediate action
  • Set policies to implement Separation of Duties (SoD) to ensure no toxic combinations exist, and if they do they 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 trail
  • 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 Separation of Duties (SoD) to avoid toxic combinations of access rights
  • Easily classify data and systems based on relevance to certain compliance mandates
  • Recertify 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 infrastructure
  • 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 modelling that is driven by analytics, mining, workflows and attestations within the Omada flexible data model
Identity Governance Blog

Role-Based Access Control

Learn why companies need role-based access control and best practices to implement it. Read the blog

https://omadaidentity.com/resources/blog/what-is-role-based-access-control/

What Functionality Do Identity Governance Solutions Provide?

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 efficient access review processes to ensure security or 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 rather than using code development to connect to a variety of cloud and on-premises applications and infrastructure to provision and deprovision access for all identities.

Audit, Compliance, and Reporting. Support the creation and evaluation of business policies, rules and governance controls, and essentially provide assurance to auditors and executive stakeholders that proper security controls are enforced.