What’s IGA?
Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) is a technique to secure the digital identities of each user, data, device, and application belonging to an organization. It helps you offer automated access to users for technology assets and resources while ensuring security and compliance.
And if you want to implement IGA in your organization, you can take the help of a good IGA provider. They can help you secure your assets by managing digital identities so that only authenticated and authorized users and devices can be given access.
Why Implement IGA?
IGA offers a lot of capabilities to address an organization’s complex challenges when it comes to security, compliance, and managing digital identities. It can help you ease your identity management process and help increase your employee efficiency while preventing risks.
Let’s understand these points in detail.
- IGA solutions automate manual, repetitive processes like managing access requests, access certifications, passwords, provisioning, deprovisioning, and more. This helps you cut down costs on these processes.
- You can reduce security risks by IGA solutions that help you identify the identity of users and devices and permit only those that are authorized. Hence, it helps you maintain security.
- Compliance with regulatory bodies like HIPAA and GDPR is essential to ensure your data is protected and you don’t get penalized. IGA solutions help you achieve this.
- Using IGA solutions makes it faster to access applications and systems for authorized users instead of constantly struggling to access each system or device.
This is why investing in the IGA solution seems like a good deal. And if you are looking for it already, make sure you choose a good one and compare your cost to investment analysis in order to maximize your return on investment (ROI) and make the most out of this solution.
Let’s understand how to do it.
How to Maximize Your ROI with IGA
Here are some of the points you can consider to understand how an IGA solution can help you, its impacts on your organization, and how to maximize your return on investment.
1. Outline Your Challenges
Before you start implementing an IGA solution, it’s necessary to understand all the challenges you have been facing with respect to managing user and device identity as well as security and compliance risks.
Look around and take feedback from employees and managers to understand your organization’s current state regarding identity governance.
For this, you must figure out:
- The difficulties your employees or contractors face
- The users, systems, applications, and devices involved
- Who is involved with what process
- Impact due to ineffective identity governance
- What areas are impacted?
- When is the first time you witness the issues
- The core reasons for the issues
When you have these answers related to identity governance and the challenges your organization is facing, document it. Take into account security and compliance risks inherent with those challenges as well. It will help you identify the possible solutions to close security and compliance gaps.
When you have documented all the challenges and their possible solutions, figure out the costs you may want to spend to address those challenges. This cost assessment may include hiring employees, freelancers, vendors, and contractors, as well as software solutions, the total number of users and devices that need this solution, time involved, and more.
Furthermore, figure out what users and devices need what level of protection, ensuring a balance between risks and user efficiency. In addition, assure to address the compliance requirements by keeping a tab of current rules and regulations.
2. Discover IGA solution’s Effectiveness
If you consider implementing an IGA solution, you must find out how it can help your organization. Discover how an IGA solution can address business-critical areas such as security, compliance, and cost.
This process helps you understand whether the IGA solution is the best one you must shortlist for the value they can bring to your organization. It must increase your employees’ efficiency while saving time on repetitive, manual identity management tasks. In addition, it must help you reduce expenditure on IT operations.
Furthermore, you can access an IGA solution’s effectiveness of how its capabilities are to offer robust security and compliance for your organization. It must offer features to secure your systems, data, and resources so no unauthorized users can access them. Next, think about the IGA’s effectiveness in terms of how it can help you with compliance.
If you can take into account these things, you will have fair information on how effective your IGA solution is to address your concerns.
3. Choose the Best IGA Solutions
Once you have enough data stating an IGA solution can help address your concerns in terms of identity management, security, and compliance, you can go ahead and implement IGA.
There are two ways of doing it:
- You can build an in-house IGA solution if you have sufficient time, resources, and workforce.
- Get an IGA solution from a service provider. It will save you plenty of time in building a solution. You can easily rent a solution from a service provider to minimize hassles, costs, and resources. It not only takes the extra burden away from you but also gives you the flexibility of choosing your favorite provider.
So, if you go ahead with an IGA solution from a service provider, you will have plenty of options to choose from. At this point, research and find various IGA providers. You can compare different IGA solutions and check their capabilities, features, security information, reliability, costs, etc.
It would help if you always chose an IGA solution with emphasis on maintaining security and compliance in addition to robust identity management. And based on your business size, you can choose an IGA solution that you can have under your budget.
Another advantage of going with an IGA solution by a service provider is that if you don’t like the services, you can always switch and get a better solution based on your preferences and requirements.
4. Detail Your Cost Calculations
Once you have chosen an IGA solution, the next thing you must do is to detail all your cost calculations. It will help you determine how to save money, time, and resources while using an IGA solution. The point here is not to overburden your organization with this additional expense.
One way to determine this is by detailing all the costs on IT operations, employees, devices, systems, and applications, business-related expenses, and other access-based expenses. You can use charts, graphs, and tables to effectively highlight all the data, points, and ideas.
This way, you can make an informed decision about implementing the IGA solution and prepare yourself to welcome an extra expenditure. It also helps you keep other expenses in check to ensure everything is balanced well.
5. Evaluate IGA Solution’s Impact
After choosing your IGA solution and making a cost analysis, you can go ahead and buy an IGA solution from a good service provider. At this point, ensure you implement the IGA solution well.
Implementing the solution is not the end of the road; you will need to assess its effectiveness and how much value it’s adding to your organization.
The best way to know it is by conducting its performance regularly after a certain duration. You can assess the solution’s performance by comparing the previous security and compliance posture before the IGA solution was implemented to the present scenario after you have implemented it.
This will help you determine how far you have come in terms of managing identity access, security, and compliance processes. Ask these questions to yourself:
- Did the IGA solution help you address your challenges?
- Whether you saw any improvements in the number of attacks, vulnerabilities, and risks?
- Did it help you maintain compliance?
- Did the solution help you manage your identity access controls easily?
If the answer to those questions is yes, the IGA solution is working for you. But if it’s a no, you may think about switching the solution or communicating to the provider about the issue for solutions.
Conclusion
Using an IGA solution can help you manage the identity of your users and devices while ensuring all your data, systems, and resources are safe, and compliance is maintained.
Thus, if you are looking to implement an IGA solution, consider the above points to choose a solution the right way and get the maximum returns on your investments.