What Is Identity Governance & Administration? IGA Explained!

Simply put, Identity Governance & Administration ensures that the right people have access to the right resources at the right time. In the modern, digital workplace, nothing happens without the right privilege. Employees need to be equipped with accounts and permissions in order to access cloud services, business applications, shared documents, local file servers and much, much more.

But with hundreds of users and dozens of unique apps and systems, it’s no easy task to ensure that everyone has access to exactly what they need for their job – and nothing beyond that. This is where Identity Governance and Administration comes in.

IGA makes sure that users have the right privileges for their job role at every stage of employment. In doing so, IGA provides seamless access to essential resources while keeping sensitive data safe from prying eyes – whether it’s a hacker piloting a compromised account or an insider threat looking to steal company secrets.

With the shift to cloud services over on-premises infrastructure, IT environments have grown increasingly decentralized. Perhaps you’ve heard the phrase “Identity is the new perimeter” before. It refers to the fact that networks used to have a clear boundary to the outside world that companies could rely on as their first line of defense. But this is no longer the case.

To support remote work and seamless collaboration, businesses are shifting more and more of their IT to the cloud. While undeniably convenient, this move to cloud and hybrid models has also lead to a massive increase in attack surface. In today’s tangled web of SaaS products, businesses store sensitive data across many different services. This means there are thousands of accounts – many of them exposed to the web – that attackers could use as a potential entry point for a data breach.

This presents a big challenge to organizations, not only because they are faced with a huge rise in cybercrime, but also because the use of countless cloud services makes it increasingly difficult to control access. Managing accounts and privileges in each app individually is inefficient, time-consuming and offers poor visibility.

IGA is a part of the larger field known as Identity & Access Management (IAM), a domain of cybersecurity that deals with user accounts and IT privileges. IAM is a broader term that covers all types of identities an organization may need to administer, as well as every step of a user’s digital journey.

As an umbrella term, IAM includes everything from solutions for secure and convenient authentication (MFA and SSO providers), tools for Data Access Governance (in-depth reporting for permissions on files and folders), tools for managing privileged identities such as admin accounts, platforms for managing customer identities and more.

Different fields within Identity & Access Management:

Identity Governance and Administration essentially allows organizations to apply rules for who is allowed to access what. The problem is that attackers do not play by the rules. They exploit and elevate their privileges. They compromise accounts and cover their tracks. They use every trick in the book.

With identity-based attacks on the rise, it became increasingly clear that governance alone is not enough to defend against more and more sophisticated threats. Organizations also need a way to see exactly what is happening on their network. Realtime visibility into identity events allows security teams to quickly detect suspicious activity and investigate potential threats.

As part of this shift to proactive defense, vendors are embracing a holistic approach known as Identity Security that combines automated governance with event monitoring and threat detection features commonly referred to as Identity Threat Detection & Response (ITDR). In other words, when you combine IGA/IAM with ITDR, you are moving into the broader field of Identity Security.

IGA solutions are built to automate and streamline the process of assigning, requesting, approving, auditing and revoking IT privileges. They help organizations ensure that each users’ privileges match their intended level of access. While the exact feature set offered will vary from solution to solution, these are the typical features you should expect from an Identity Governance & Administration tool:

RBAC is a model for access control in which organizations establish default privileges intended for different jobs and then create permission roles that bundle together these baseline permissions. This allows orgs to quickly provide new users with the access they need by adding them to the roles that match their job function. IGA supports every step of this process, from creating roles by analyzing existing permission structures (role mining) to automated provisioning of accounts and entitlements.

As users join your organization, move to different departments or leave, they need to be added to the right roles to reflect their current level of access. Lifecycle management automates this process: By detecting changes in your data source (such as an HR platform), IGA solutions can automatically trigger the necessary lifecycle workflows – whether it’s onboarding new users, updating existing accounts or offboarding terminated employees.

From time to time, users will need additional permissions on top of their baseline access to take on special projects or collaborations. A self-service platform for end users allows them to request the access they need. Requests are processed by the data owners assigned to the resource in question. This allows departments to govern access to their own data without the need to involve IT – but while maintaining a complete audit trail.

To support a wide variety of requests and approvals, governance solutions come with powerful workflow editors that allow organizations to build their own custom approval workflows. These can range from simple yes or no requests to branching workflows with multiple approvals and different fallbacks and escalations.

To prevent fraud or conflicts of interest, IGA solutions allow you to mark certain privileges as incompatible with one another. For example, the same user should not be able to submit invoices and approve them for payment. Separation of Duties is an important control, especially in heavily regulated industries. Governance platforms allow you to set SoD rules and enforce them automatically. This prevents conflicting privileges from being assigned or triggers the intended approval workflows.

Regular privilege audits help organizations catch and remove unwanted permissions – for example, access granted for a specific project that was not revoked once the project ended. IGA solutions streamline this process of user access reviews (also known as access certification), automatically notifying reviewers and providing them with a clear and actionable checklist of privileges to renew or revoke.

There many factors that contribute to if you should buy an IGA solution and, if so, which. Typically, once organizations grow to over a hundred users, they start to feel the pain of managing accounts and privileges by hand: IT teams are constantly busy with manual on- and offboarding or smaller adjustments. Access requests take forever to process. Stale accounts and excess privileges pile up.

Challenges like these are a good reason to look for an IGA solution. But even then, the product you choose has to match your specific needs, it has to work well with the apps and systems you use and it has to fit the size and shape of your org. These are just a few of the questions you need to consider before you pick an IGA tool.

Checklist: How to choose an IGA solution

As we have established, solutions in the IAM space often include features from more than one category, for example by combining IGA with Data Access Governance (DAG) or Privileged Access Management (PAM).

Many Identity Providers in particular have started to add limited governance support to their platforms, which serve primarily as an identity repository, directory service and single-sign on solution. The term Light IGA has emerged to contrast these built-in features from dedicated, full-scale Identity Governance solutions.

Combining secure authentication and identity administration into a single platform sounds understandably tempting, especially to existing users who do not want to add another solution to their Identity stack. The problem is that Light IGA only offers surface-level governance, not in-depth control. Permissions that do not map to groups and apps that do not integrate with your IdP are simply out of bounds for these Light IGA platforms.

When it comes to dedicated Identity Governance platforms, one of the most important distinctions to consider is between traditional IGA solutions, also known as Legacy IGA, and a faster breed of modern solutions. So, what exactly is the difference?

Legacy IGA was built to serve the needs of large-scale organizations in the enterprise segment: Huge corporations and public bodies with equally complex governance structures. The type of sprawling and disjointed networks where you are dealing with completely different apps, rules and processes from one office to the next.

Legacy IGA solutions are designed to accommodate these internal inconsistencies. Unfortunately, this also makes them very complex tools by design. The degree of flexibility needed to cover every possible edge case makes Legacy IGA difficult to set up and painful to use. Anytime you want to do something, there are roughly 20 different settings you need to configure first.

By comparison, modern IGA solutions offer a streamlined approach to governance, with a quick setup, user-friendly interface and out-of-the-box integrations. This allows modern IGA to provide a comprehensive feature set, but at a much faster pace than conventional solutions – making it the right choice for orgs that do not have the resources or IT staff to spend years setting up a heavyweight platform.

As we’ve discussed, Legacy IGA is designed to be infinitely customizable. But this also means that legacy solutions require heavy customization to become functional. These platforms are essentially sold as building kits: To integrate the solution with your existing stack, you need to create the interactions and workflows between Legacy IGA and your other IT systems.

As a result, Legacy IGA needs a lot of time and effort to become operational, both from your own staff and outside consultants. Typical deployments take months or even years to complete. Many never make it that far: A lot of Legacy IGA projects end up in distress and remain permanently unfinished.

Vendors tend to downplay the complexity of their solution, leading organizations to underestimate the time, budget and IT staff required to make effective use of an enterprise-scale IGA platform. Despite the high degree of customizability these tools offer in theory, the majority of businesses are better served with a simpler IGA platform that can be deployed quickly and places less strain on your IT staff and end users.

So what exactly allows modern IGA solutions like tenfold to be deployed so much faster than Legacy IGA platforms? The key difference maker here is out-of-the-box support for systems like Active Directory, Microsoft 365 and workplace applications. In other words, the apps that companies want to manage using their Identity Governance solution.

While old-school IGA tools require custom scripting to specify how they should interact with all these applications, modern solutions ship with fully fleshed-out plugins that offer everything you need to start working out of the box: interactions, workflows, templates. Instead of painstakingly coding rules and behaviors, you just configure tenfold through its no-code UI. It’s quick, easy and convenient – the fastest path to a comprehensive IGA platform!

Speed up your IGA integration with tenfold, our revolutionary no-code IGA solution. From automated onboarding to lifecycle management, centralized reporting and streamlined access reviews, tenfold offers everything you could want out of an IGA platform in one convenient package.

Thanks to our library of ready-to-use plugins, tenfold can be set up in a fraction of the time it takes to deploy conventional IGA solutions. Don’t believe us? Sign up for a free 30 day trial to see just how easy Identity Governance & Administration can be, or book a personal demo to see tenfold in action!