Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) – What is?

Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) is a group of technologies that enable and secure digital identities of all applications, users, and data. It helps businesses to manage the growing number of technology assets by maintaining security and reducing compliance risks. IGA manages workflows to provision and de-provision assets and provides access control. It is very important due to the nature of work nowadays i.e., work from home, as it is very difficult to keep track of the resources, identity, and access management.

Basic Components

The basic components of IGA are:

• Identity Governance: Policies and procedures that deal with role management, segregation of duties, analytics, logging, access reviews, and reporting.
• Identity Administration: It deals with the policies of device and user provisioning and de-provisioning, credential and account management, and entitlement management.

Business Benefints

IGA is very helping for businesses to address complex challenges in the everchanging business environment by providing a balance of four critical business objectives:

1. Reduce Operational Cost: it cuts operational costs by automating labor-intensive tasks like access requests, access certifications, provisioning or de-provisioning, and password management. With its easily operatable user interface, it takes very little time for IT administrators to perform administrative activities and it empowers employees to independently request and review access and manage passwords. It provides a dashboard that contains analytics that can be utilized by upper management for decision making.
2. Strengthen Security and Risk Reduction: Identities can be compromised if the user credentials are weak, stolen, or default and due to compromised identities organization faces many threats. IGA provides a centralized yet secured view that shows access to all assets and due to this view, the authorized person can detect any inappropriate access, weak controls, or policy violation that can cause risk to the organization. It has made it easy for business and IT users to reach the cause of risks and to remediate the risks.
3. Audit Performance and Improve Compliance: IGA checks the controls whether controls are positioned perfectly to ensure privacy and security. It also gives a business process for password management and also giving, checking, and validating the access whether who can access which part and who is not authorized to access any part, this all is under the common role or risk model. By giving access based on role, companies reduce the cost of the compliance, repeatedly checking for any fault and managing and checking for risks, results in the easy audit and easy management of the whole system.
4. Provide Efficient and Fast Access to Business: IGA provides timely access and provisioning of resources to the employee that they require to complete their jobs, to keep them productive and remain productive even if their job responsibilities changes.

Conclusion

Identity Governance and Administration are critical to every business as in this digital world, hackers are constantly trying to find loopholes to compromise systems or networks and access user credentials. Businesses need to protect their information and privileges to ensure strong access control. IGA is not only effective in large businesses but also small businesses or startups as they are constantly looking for ways to increase customer base, IGA can be helpful by ensuring the compliance of the business with regulations.