In today’s world, managing user access to applications and systems can be a complex task. The complexity is compounded by the ubiquity of cloud and hybrid environments.
As organizations face increasing demands, mandates, and compliance regulations, identity governance and administration solutions have emerged to help address these challenges. These solutions enable organizations to efficiently oversee user provisioning, password management, policy management, access governance, and identity repositories.
Risk Management
In this age of cybersecurity threats, identity governance and administration are crucial parts of any IT risk management program. By ensuring the right users have access to the right resources at the right time, IAM can help you maintain security and compliance while reducing operational inefficiencies.
IAM also helps ensure that users have the proper access to the information they need for their job. It allows you to streamline business processes and provide better service levels.
IT security solutions like Omada IGA solution provide identity governance and administration that help reduce your organization’s risk of compliance violations. For example, it enables you to identify and remediate policy violations, inappropriate access privileges, and weak controls to improve IT security and reduce compliance burdens.
As new compliance mandates continue to come online, organizations must find ways to meet these requirements while preserving organizational efficiency and productivity. In addition, regulations like HIPAA, GDPR, and SOX have created many new compliance challenges for businesses of all sizes.
A holistic approach to risk management – which considers the relationships among risks and how they impact operations – is critical for success. However, traditional risk management, which relies on business units identifying and addressing the risks they are responsible for, can result in “siloed” efforts that can miss essential connections or cumulative impacts.
Compliance
For many organizations, compliance is a necessary part of their operations and culture. It helps companies align with regulations and standards, including privacy laws and business ethics. It also reduces risks and enables employees to do their job more effectively.
As regulations and compliance standards have become more stringent, businesses have been pressured to implement IGA processes to protect user accounts, access privileges, and other corporate resources. This pressure has risen due to advanced cyber threats, data breaches, and government regulations.
In addition to helping organizations mitigate risks and keep their data secure, identity governance can help prevent and remediate issues that have the potential to negatively impact your company’s reputation, operations, and bottom line. These include bribery, corruption, and other criminal behavior.
IGA solutions provide visibility into people’s access to systems, ensuring they have the rights they need and are not being granted inappropriate or unnecessary access. It also allows organizations to re-grant or remove access to ensure they meet audit and compliance requirements and enable various review processes that evaluate the risk associated with giving people permissions. As a result, it can help avoid fatigue and rubber-stamping and improve user experience and efficiency.
User Experience
User experience is a core component of Identity Governance and Administration. With an increased focus on user-centric processes, IT leaders must ensure their IGA solutions provide easy and intuitive access for business users to request and manage their access privileges.
A business-friendly user interface can reduce the time IT staff spends on administrative tasks and empower users to request access, manage passwords, and review their access independently. As a result, it can improve productivity and help minimize operational inefficiencies.
Another benefit is that IGA can help reduce operational costs by automating labor-intensive processes. For example, organizations can automatically adjust access as users change roles, reducing the need for IT to perform these tasks.
A good IGA solution can improve security and reduce risk by automating policy enforcement and enabling access certification campaigns. These processes can detect and mitigate common security risks such as user account compromise, insider theft, and data loss.
Planning carefully and identifying long-term objectives is essential to maximize your IGA solution’s value. It involves assessing the components most relevant to your unique business needs and selecting a technology to support them. It also involves creating a roadmap that provides quick wins to the business while delivering strong ROI to drive future phases of your IGA project.
Security
Security is at the core of identity governance and administration. It’s essential to any IT risk mitigation strategy, enabling organizations to protect their business and data against threats and meet compliance guidelines.
IGA also helps companies keep their employees safe. It decreases the likelihood of data breaches and guarantees that critical information is only accessible to authorized individuals.
In addition, IGA provides companies with a secure, consistent way to manage passwords and user access requests. It also helps businesses comply with regulations such as HIPAA and SOX.
With the rise of nationalism, terrorism, and global concerns about privacy, cybersecurity, and human rights violations, organizations must be more proactive when protecting their digital assets. IGA helps companies keep their identities safe, so they can better focus on other priorities.
When choosing an IGA solution, look for a scalable, unified architecture to meet your business needs today and tomorrow. It should also have a robust partner ecosystem to help you with implementation and support. Lastly, it should include features that improve efficiency and user experience.