A successful Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) solution enables your organisation to run smoothly on a day-to-day basis. With IGA, employees can access the resources and systems they need without compromising the security of sensitive data. IGA minimises the cost of manual work through scalable automation and facilitates compliance.
Underestimating the importance of IGA can cause security risks to build up over time. If your business is hit with a non-compliance fine or suffers a breach relating to inappropriately assigned access permissions, the ideal time to act has already passed.
IGA acts as a pre-emptive measure, saving money, reducing risk, and improving your processes in the long term. As an example, a breach of GDPR can result in a fine of up to 4% of global annual revenue, or 20 million euros (whichever is higher), so a preventative strategy is key.
When choosing an IGA solution to invest in, understanding technical jargon and the wide variety of features on offer can be overwhelming. When combined with budget or time pressures this can make selecting the right option for your organisation seem like a difficult hill to climb. This doesn’t need to be the case. Below are some key points to consider when seeking the right IGA solution for your business:
You need to be clear about who the stakeholders for IGA are in your business, what their drivers are, and how optimising the organisation’s IGA will benefit their objectives. For compliance officers, for example, the safety net of having full visibility and reporting capabilities will improve efficiency in their day-to-day.
IGA has a wide impact across many aspects of an organisation, so make sure to consider areas like the Help Desk and HR as well as the more obvious stakeholders like IT security.
With your stakeholders established, you can consider your use case and how this will align with your business drivers. If you are at an early stage in your IGA journey, a governance-focused approach will allow high-priority security and risk concerns to be identified and addressed first. Automation and higher operational efficiency can then be layered onto the foundation of a secure system.
It is important to factor the type and number of identities into any decisions around identity security and management. The number of identities your organisation needs to manage will likely influence the focus of your use cases, as will the nature of your user communities and the interactions they have with the business.
For example, a business which experiences frequent larger scale changes to access needs (perhaps through seasonal variations or other influences in the market) may want to prioritise gaining visibility and control of who can access what systems as a first step.
Before diving into decision-making, it’s essential to understand your current situation. Identity Governance and Administration is not one size fits all – your ideal solution will depend on current pain points in the business, and areas of most risk that need prioritising.
A comprehensive view of where your organisation currently stands gives you a practical starting point. If you’re interested in discovering the current state of your IGA, our Maturity Assessment would be a perfect place to start.
With knowledge of your current issues, establish specific goals for the solution you’d like, and identify metrics that can be measured against KPIs to track improvements. For example, knowing how many hours help-desk staff spend assisting with access problems will allow you to monitor efficiency gains from automation.
Having a clear view of what capabilities you need lets you pinpoint exactly what you want from your solution. Limit your requirements to ones that will make a difference for your organisation’s most important business needs.
A thorough understanding of what you’re trying to achieve with your Identity Governance and Administration is key to finding the right solution. For more information on how we can assist you with any IGA related discussions, please do get in touch here.