Light IGA: Myths & Facts about Modern Identity Governance & Administration

The term Light IGA describes solutions for Identity Governance & Administration that can be deployed faster and require less effort to manage and operate than traditional IGA platforms. Lightweight solutions achieve this by streamlining and simplifying the setup process, as well as focusing on out-of-the-box integrations. This allows Light IGA to offer a comprehensive governance toolset at a much lower cost than Legacy IGA solutions, which a require long and expensive setup.

Characteristics of Light IGA solutions:

Light IGA is often put up against traditional solutions in the Identity Governance space. There are different ways to phrase this comparison – light vs. heavy or modern vs. legacy – but the main difference being asserted remains the same: Light IGA solutions are faster and easier than conventional governance platforms.

To see whether there is anything to this claim, let’s first look at Legacy IGA. There’s no denying that traditional IGA solutions offer a wide range of features. On paper, these legacy platforms can address any use case you throw at them. But in practice, there’s a big problem that limits the effective usage of Legacy IGA: These tools were designed to serve the needs of huge enterprises.

Legacy IGA is built to be infinitely tweakable and customizable – which is necessary to accommodate the many internal inconsistencies in enterprise-scale environments: Office A uses completely different apps and processes than Office B. Office C was acquired in a merger and never fully integrated with our network and then there’s a satellite office in another country that has to comply with different regulations, and so on and so on.

But this degree of flexibility has a price: Legacy IGA requires heavy customization to become operational. Solutions like these often take years to roll out and many deployments end up unfinished, in distress or worse.

By focusing on speed and out-of-the-box support, Light IGA is able to reduce deployment time without compromising on functionality. A modern IGA platform can be fully operational in just a few weeks.

While the term Light IGA emerged to describe a new breed of modern, full-scale IGA solutions that offer simplified deployment and operations, it is sometimes used to refer to the built-in governance tools packaged with Identity Providers or other security solutions.

For example: Platforms like Okta or Entra ID, which are primarily used for their authentication, single sign-on and directory services, have started to incorporate some governance features into their products, such as basic support for user lifecycles or self-service requests.

The problem with these offerings is that IGA is not the focus of the product, which means they only offer a limited, pared-down set of features. The governance toolset packaged with Identity Providers is simply not on-par with a dedicated IGA solution.

These built-in IGA tools do not give you fine-grained control over entitlements. Instead of comprehensive governance and in-depth visibility, IdPs only allow you to manage group-based permissions, and only for apps that can be connected to that Identity Provider. Resources that cannot be managed through the IdP fall through the cracks. Not to mention various functional limitations like missing support for complex workflows or automations.

The question of what kind of IGA solution you should use depends on many factors, including the size, structure and specific needs of your organization. Identity Governance and Administration is only one area in the larger field of Identity & Access Management, so it’s important to think about which challenges you are trying to solve and what type of solution is best suited to that need.

The view of Light IGA as a pared-down version of full IGA platform that only includes some of the necessary features for effective governance is likely rooted in the use of the term to describe the built-in IGA capabilities of Identity Providers and other products.

It’s true that platforms which offer IGA on the side are no replacement for a dedicated IGA solution. But this not the only form of Light IGA! There are full-featured solutions like tenfold that combine the quick and easy deployment of Light IGA with a comprehensive governance toolset.

tenfold Features:

Some organizations worry that because Light IGA aims to simplify Identity & Access Governance, that means it can only handle simple tasks. This concern is stoked by legacy solutions, who like to argue that their complicated tools are necessary to deal with complex workflows.

This is not true. Light IGA solutions are designed to cover all your governance needs. From complex workflows to intricate rulesets and tiered, multi-stage approval processes, Light IGA can handle any task you throw at it. There are very few, hyper-specific scenarios that only legacy platforms can deal with – which are not relevant for 99.99% of organizations!

So should you buy a slower, more complex solution because you are worried about an entirely hypothetical scenario? Obviously not! That would be like buying a semitruck for daily driving, just in case you suddenly need to move a shipping container from A to B.

When it comes to governing access, the devil is in the details. To protect sensitive data and ensure compliance, you need fine-grained control over IT privileges. A solution that can only manage group-based permissions and show you which apps a user can access is not enough! What about permission roles within applications? What about object-level permissions on file servers, file shares or cloud documents?

The good news is: There are dedicated governance solutions under the Light IGA umbrella that go beyond group-based entitlements to give you in-depth visibility and control. For example, tenfold offers both IGA and a comprehensive toolset for data access governance, giving you complete control over user access.

This myth is especially harmful because in reality, the opposite is true! Legacy IGA providers like to make bold claims about their rich and deep integrations, but the truth is that these require heavy customization before they are ready to use. Typically, legacy solutions offer an API or connector, but rely on customers and consultants to code how these different apps should interact.

By contrast, Light IGA solutions focus on fully functional out-of-the-box integration, meaning that that these platforms offer ready-to-use plugins that come with templates for essential workflows, allowing you to start automating governance tasks right away. That means no long and complex setup, just activate a plugin, tweak a few settings and you’re good to go!

Rising threats and complex, hybrid environments make IGA a growing need for organizations of all sizes. But existing legacy solutions are a poor fit for most organizations due to their high cost, long setup and huge workload.

This excessive burden is exactly what drove the development of smart, modern Light IGA solutions like tenfold. By offering the same comprehensive governance toolset with less effort and a much faster deployment, Light IGA allows orgs with smaller budgets, smaller IT teams and smaller user bases to tackle governance challenges with a quick, convenient and cost-effective solution.

Are you looking for a way to simplify the administration of user accounts and IT privileges? tenfold, our revolutionary No-Code IAM solution, is the fastest and most convenient way to automate governance tasks from user lifecycles to access audits and in-depth reporting.

But you don’t have to take our word for it! Book a personal demo to see tenfold in action and speak to a qualified tech ready to answer any questions you might have about integrating tenfold with your stack. Or sign up for a free 30-day trial, to explore our IGA solution yourself. This trial offer includes four hours of free consulting to set up our platform and unlimited tech support.

If you need modern, lightweight IGA platform to automate governance and streamline IT operations, then look no further than tenfold. Contact us today to learn more.