What Is Identity Governance (IGA)?

When thinking about cybersecurity, people typically associate it with things like phishing scams, social engineering, and data breaches. But, there’s another, lesser-known vertical within the space called IGA, which stands for Identity Governance and Administration. In this article, we will be covering what identity governance is, why it exists, and how it helps organizations minimize risk.

A Brief History

During the late 1990’s, the United States experienced two of the largest financial scandals it had ever seen: The bankruptcies of energy giant, Enron, and American telecom company, Worldcom.

Unlike more recent economic issues, such as the banking crisis of 2008, extreme instances of fraud caused the topple of Enron and Worldcom. This fraud negatively impacted shareholders, employees, and the public alike. The government saw a need for action to prevent future institutions from falling victim to the same scams. And so, as a direct response, Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (also known as SOX) in 2002.

With SOX came a more formal regulation of publicly-traded companies. This included the establishment of checks and balances across access, IT security, data backup, and change management.

What is Identity Governance and Administration (IGA)? 

At the heart of it, identity governance is a foundational part of IT and cybersecurity operations. Falling under Identity and Access Management (IAM), it focuses on giving businesses deeper insights into their identity and access landscape. It seeks to provide IT teams and key stakeholders an increased understanding of their identity ecosystem, allowing them to stay legally compliant with the auditing and compliance standards that acts like SOX put in place. 

What are the main goals of IGA? 

Identity governance seeks to achieve four key objectives:

1. Improving Audit and Compliance Performance: 
   Identity Governance ensures that proper measures are in place to meet the security requirements of legal regulatory standards like SOX, HIPAA, and GDPR. It does this in two main ways: 1) Through establishing a consistent policy, risk, and/or role model and 2) Automating lifecycle management to allow for tools like role-based access controls to ensure that people only have the access they need within the context of their role. 
2. Lessening Risk and Strengthening Security:
   Identity Governance allows teams to quickly detect improper account access, orphaned/dormant accounts, and policy violations through a comprehensive, centralized system. This makes it easier to enforce IT controls that are essential to strong security posture and implement important cybersecurity best practices like the principle of least privilege.
3. Reducing Operational Costs: 
   Identity Governance allows for the automation of processes that, traditionally, require a large amount of time and labor. These automations reduce the time IT staff spends on identity governance-related tasks like user access reviews and identity lifecycle management. Identity Governance also minimizes wasteful spending as a results of things like orphaned accounts and shadow IT. 
4. Quick and Effective Access to the Business: 
   Timely access to resources enables increased productivity, allowing businesses to meet service-level requirements without compromising security or compliance. This access also helps to protect against organizations approving audits en masse (aka rubberstamping.) 

How Clarity is redefining Identity Governance and Administration

For the majority of companies, especially publicly-traded entities, the primary objective of identity governance initiatives is to have good audit outcomes. This is a top priority because audits failures have massive consequences that include, but aren't limited to: damaged brand reputation, loss of investor confidence, and even complete annihilation of the business.

As the leader in risk-powered identity governance, Clarity’s patented system and machine learning, enables organizations to approach lifecycle management with ease and conduct audits in an entirely new way. Our user-friendly platform mitigates the risk of audit failures and allows companies to optimize their efficiency through lifecycle management.

Schedule a demo today to see first-hand how we are redefining the realm of Identity Governance.