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New to Identity Governance? Here’s What to Look for in a Modern Identity Governance Solution

by Tim Bedard on November 11, 2020

You likely have an identity governance and administration (IGA) solution in place to address data privacy and regulatory requirements. “Identity governance” refers to identity needs like access request approvals and certifying user access levels, and “administration” refers to the back-end user account provisioning processes in place to meet those needs. In this blog, we’ll look at the requirements that have driven the adoption of identity governance and administration, how the changing identity landscape is posing challenges for legacy IGA solutions, and how modern IGA approaches fill those gaps.

Why You Need an Identity Governance and Administration Solution

You have to manage user access requirements, ensure compliance with an ever-increasing number of regulations, protect your organizational data and intellectual property, and maintain a seamless customer experience across multiple devices. IGA solutions have evolved over the years to address this broad set of needs.

A robust identity governance and administration solution should enable the certification of appropriate user access levels and allow you to govern that access with policy-based controls. Additionally, it should enable your security and compliance teams to handle access requests, access approvals, and role administration. An effective IGA solution should also help your organization achieve regulatory compliance.

IGA Landscape Challenges

You’ve likely had your existing identity governance and administration solution in place for a long time, and you’ve seen the identity landscape change drastically around it. Accelerating changes in enterprise technologies, cyberthreats, and the user landscape are putting growing pressure on traditional IGA solutions and, in turn, on your security and compliance teams.

The identity landscape today encompasses a growing number and type of users, accounts, devices, applications, and systems. Applications and systems are no longer just on-premises. They live in a dizzying hybrid of on-premises, cloud, and SaaS environments – and your users, encompassing your workforce, consumers, and partners, access them from many different devices and networks. On top of these complexities, you’re protecting your data and users against an increasing number of internal and external threats while the number of compliance regulations mounts.

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You’re left with a critical question: Can your IGA solution keep up?

Identity Silos Leave you with Poor Visibility
Enterprise IT environments become more complex every year, increasing the number of applications and systems you provide user access to. Most legacy identity governance solutions don’t connect and manage all applications, especially with systems living in a hybrid of on-premises and cloud environments. Combined with your user identity information scattered across multiple identity silos, this can lead to poor enterprise user access visibility, a lack of context, and an inability to recommend appropriate access privileges, like entitlements and role assignments. It’s difficult to secure identities, user access and maintain compliance when you don’t have – and can’t achieve – complete visibility.
Compliance Becomes Challenging
Your IGA solution should enable you to understand who has access to what, but with fragmented visibility, your security and compliance teams don’t have the information needed to be compliant with the increasing number of regulations. Longstanding regulations like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) have been joined by new legislation like General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), are increasing the pressure on your security and compliance teams. Breaching these regulations comes at a high cost. Noncompliance with SOX can cost organizations up to $25 million in fines as well as criminal or civil prosecution. It’s estimated that $192 million in GDPR violations have been levied against companies since the legislation went into effect.
Resources are Exhausted
Identity governance solutions are expected to work across multiple siloed environments with tens of millions of access privileges spread across legacy and modern applications on both on-premise and cloud environments. Automation is critical to preventing your teams from over provisioning or granting inappropriate access privileges. Unfortunately, many legacy systems can’t be automated, resulting in an overflow of access requests for your team. Requests that require manual, human reviews and fulfillment.

The shortcomings of existing IGA solutions can lead to identity governance fatigue and leave your organization more vulnerable. When considering a new, modern IGA solution, here are a few best practices to look for:

AI-Driven IGA Solution – A modern identity lifecycle management solution that simplifies and automates the access request, access approval, certification and role modeling processes. By leveraging an AI-driven analytics engine, the solution identifies and applies appropriate user access, automates high-confidence access approvals, recommends low risk accounts for certification, re-certifies high-risk accounts, and automates the removal of unnecessary roles.

A solution that automates access and governance controls to more easily manage the demands of today’s dynamic workforce throughout the entire users’ lifecycle.

Data Agnostic – A solution that does not include data bias, a data model that reflects the entire user access landscape. A solution that provides the ability to contextually examine all identity-related data, identify and recommend the right level of user access rights via high, medium, and low confident scores while providing the ability to apply appropriate birthright and or leaver user access rights to accounts, applications, systems, roles, and entitlements across the enterprise.

A solution that reduces overall request volumes by predicting appropriate user access at the right time, to the right resources.

Extensible Data Model – A solution with a highly scalable identity model for managing all users, devices, and things. A solution that enables data aggregation from diverse identity authoritative sources combined with an identity relationship model. A data visualization model that automatically identifies contextual relationships across users, devices, and things.

A solution that automates identity orchestration and automation across access management, identity governance, and identity management via AI-based remediation recommendations.

ForgeRock Identity Governance and Administration

The ForgeRock Identity Governance and Administration solution is an integral part of the ForgeRock Identity Platform. The solution provides real-time, continuous enterprise-wide user access visibility, control, and remediation. A solution that simplifies the manual access request, access approval, certification, and role mining processes while providing full identity lifecycle management for creating, managing, and restricting identity access to accounts, systems, applications, and infrastructure. A solution you can strengthen your security posture and automatically drive regulatory compliance.

Amplify Your Existing IGA Solutions with AI-Driven Identity Analytics

ForgeRock Autonomous Identity is an AI-driven identity analytics solution that can be layered on top of, and integrated with, your existing IGA solution. The solution provides contextual, enterprise-wide visibility by collecting and analyzing all identity data, enabling contextual insight of low, medium, and high-risk user access at scale. It identifies and alerts your security and compliance teams about high-risk access or policy violations. By automating much of what is being done manually today, your team is freed up to focus on higher priority tasks and projects. And, by automatically examining enterprise-wide identity data, Autonomous Identity helps break down identity silos. You get an always updated contextual view of your entire user access identity landscape – what good access should and shouldn’t look like.

With ForgeRock Identity Governance and Administration and Autonomous Identity solutions, you can overcome identity governance fatigue, keep pace with user access demands, mitigate risk, and achieve regulatory compliance.