Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) in IT Infrastructure of Today

by David Balaban on June 15, 2018

Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) can be considered a very important area in the management of information technology in enterprises and organizations. The level of IGA importance can be compared to managing licenses, configurations, security incidents, vulnerabilities and other processes well described in the ITIL libraries. Moreover, although IGA is not the basic process of ITIL, its role only grows with time. Among the reasons for the increase in the importance of IGA, one can single out the increase in the role of information security and the growth of both external and internal threats, the heterogeneity and complexity of systems and software.

IGA solves the following tasks important for IT infrastructure of an enterprise:

Enhancing IT-systems information security.
Optimizing the information systems load.
Optimizing the work of users in information systems, as well as IT staff.

The implementation of the Identity Governance and Administration solution, like any IT system that automates business processes, cannot be done without serious changes in the business processes of the organization. Moreover, here we are talking mostly about personnel management, including identity and access management. The “maturity” of these processes directly affects the quality of the implementation of the IGA system. Organizations planning to implement and further develop IGA system should systematize and structure these processes in advance. Already at this stage, “distortions” can be identified, which are to be fixed best before the IGA system implementation itself.

At the preliminary stage of implementation, the organization must go through external or internal consulting, the results of which should formalize the appropriate access management processes, and refine the existing information systems, first, the personnel management infrastructure. A good result at the end of the consulting stage is the development of a role-based access control model.

Assessing the relevance of the system to the existing IT landscape (Read more...)