What’s IGA?

Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) refers to an approach of managing identities and access controls of your users and devices to prevent security and compliance risks while boosting employee efficiency.

IGA essentially comprises of two parts:

•       Identity governance: It addresses the management of roles, duties, logging, reporting, and analytics.
•       Identity administration: It addresses the management of accounts, passwords, credentials, devices, access permissions, user provisioning, and user deprovisioning.

The above two parts of IGA help improve compliance and security by mitigating possible risks. This approach goes one step ahead of traditional approaches.

An organization can implement this approach by using an IGA solution offered by providers. You can find a lot of them on the internet with impressive capabilities that can cater to businesses of all sizes.

The key features in an IGA solution can be:

•       Password management
•       Automated provision and deprovisioning
•       Integration connectors
•       Privilege management
•       Segregating duties
•       Role-based access management
•       Reviewing access
•       Logging, Reporting, and analytics

Let’s now address the big question,

Top 5 Reasons You Need IGA

IGA can offer a lot of benefits to organizations across industry verticals. No matter what your business size or type is, IGA can help secure your devices and users while ensuring only the right people can access the right resources at the right time.

So, if you are wondering why you need to implement an IGA solution in your organization, here are some of the points to help you understand.

1. Improved Security

Cyberattacks are advancing and becoming more grave than ever. Businesses from across the globe face these risks and have lost millions in the wake of a deadly cyberattack.

If you don’t fix the loopholes in your systems, devices, applications, or processes, it may convert into an attack. It may lead to exposed sensitive information, malicious intrusions, account takeovers, and so on.

As a result, your business can suffer in terms of reputation, customer trust, and money. But using an advanced approach to securing your data and systems like IGA, you can improve your security posture organization-wide.

IGA solutions have capabilities like password management, role-based controls, privilege management, etc., to help maintain security. You can enforce strict password policies and guide your employees to use unique, strong password combinations in their accounts that attackers can’t guess or infiltrate.

Similarly, by using role-based access (RBAC) and privilege access controls, you can restrict your users from accessing the data and system that they are not supposed to. It will limit the attack surface, which will help you improve your security. Thus, you are secure from both sides – outside attackers and inside malicious agents.

2. Maintaining Regulatory Compliance

Regulatory bodies like HIPAA and GDPR have become more strict when it comes to data privacy and security. This is actually essential keeping in mind the increasing cyberattacks all over the world, leading to exposed customer data and serious risks.

So, you must comply with these regulations to keep your customer data and business-related information safe from attackers. And if you don’t do it, you are inviting serious trouble from both sides – attackers and regulatory bodies. As a result, your businesses can suffer.

Therefore, comply with the regulatory bodies applicable to your area or country. And an IGA solution helps you achieve this.

An IGA solution can help you continuously monitor who accesses what data while limiting user and device access. It enables you to grant users or employees limited access permissions for systems, devices, applications, and resources. They will get only enough permission required to complete their job, not more than that. Hence, risks can be minimized.

IGA solutions also come with features such as logging, reporting, and analytics that help you record the information, like who accessed which data or resource at what time. You can also conduct a thorough analysis of every activity to detect any malicious activity or violation that may pose security threats to your organization.

In addition, using reporting will help you document each detail clearly and precisely to meet industry and government regulations.

Furthermore, an IGA solution will also help you conduct periodic reviews using an intuitive and user-friendly dashboard that makes the process easier. This also lets you compare your security improvements and detect issues so that you can work on them to fix vulnerability issues immediately and improve security.

3. Efficient and Business Operation

Using a good IGA solution can help an organization achieve more in less time and with fewer efforts. With increasing attacks and complexities, security teams have a lot of areas to cover, like managing the identities of each device and user in the organizational network, user permissions, access levels, as well as reporting issues and fixing them.

All these processes take time, and you can’t possibly keep hiring more and more individually for manual operations, which will further increase your cost.

The best scenario here is to use an IGA solution to automate the tasks. It will help you provision and deprovision users automatically with ease, manage identities and permission, review everything in a dashboard quickly, and so on.

This way, your employees can be more productive and efficient instead of waiting for manual access permissions. As a result of faster operations, your overall business process will accelerate. So, while increasing your operational efficiency, you can also keep improving your security posture. 

4. Cost efficiency

IGA solutions can prove to be cost-efficient for organizations. The reason is traditional security solutions tend to be tedious and time-consuming. Hence, if your employees are always engaged in doing this manual process repeatedly, you essentially are wasting your resources and workforce on things that you can easily automate using advanced technologies like IGA solutions.

Another disadvantage of using traditional approaches is that they may invite many errors and complexities while managing access controls and identities. Your employees might be working from anywhere using any device, and hence, it becomes difficult to grant permissions manually for each of them.

And if there are any errors in these processes, it can compound to higher risks in terms of security.

For example, if a malicious user is given access accidentally, you are at a greater risk of getting your data leaked, exposing sensitive information and customer data. This not only translates into a deadly attack but also can cost you thousands and millions of dollars, along with reduced customer trust.

But using an effective and secure IGA solution will save you from risks and are cost-efficient. You can get them easily on the internet as they come in various sizes and shapes to fit your business needs. You can choose the one suitable for your budget and change it if you don’t like the solution.

Although you can build an IGA solution in-house, it may again require a lot of time and resources. Hence, using an IGA solution from a reputed provider can be a better alternative, especially if you have a small business.

5. Easy to Implement 

Implementing an IGA solution is not much of a hassle. You can research and find a good IGA solution by comparing the options based on the cost, features, interface, security capabilities, and so on.

The beauty of using an already made IGA solution is that you can get started with it quite easily. It’s also easy to use by your employees of varying skill levels without posing a steep learning curve.

This solution helps you simplify your life by making identity management easier, provisioning and deprovisioning users, and managing access controls for users and devices.

Moreover, the IGA service providers offer a smooth onboarding process to help you learn how to use the solution with ease. And if you feel any difficulty, you can always reach out to their support team for help.

Using an IGA solution will remove inefficiencies as you don’t have to wait for long periods for your requests to get approved. Similarly, you also don’t have to worry about access controls of your former employees as you can see all the access they had through logging and reporting. This will also help you spot anomalies and fix issues before they can convert into a security disaster.

Conclusion

Identity and governance administration (IGA) can help an organization streamline its business operations, improve employee productivity, secure its data, users, and systems, and meet compliance risks. It can also help you cut down costs on manual, repetitive tasks by automating your business processes.

Thus, IGA is an excellent solution for businesses of all sizes. And if you want to implement an IGA solution, you can find a lot of providers. Just look at their pricing, features, and capabilities and choose the best one based on your budget and preference.