Identity Governance: Why Enterprises Don’t Implement It?

Maintaining the digital environment of an enterprise is a complex task and it takes more than technology to make things right. Businesses are in continuous need of regulatory controls like identity governance to maintain their brand value and simultaneously control their resources.

It can be deployed in the cloud or on-premises environment - the choice is exclusive.

So before moving any further, let’s get the basics right.

What is Identity Governance? 

Identity governance and administration (IGA) is the solutions guide to managing the digital identity and access rights of enterprises across multiple systems.

Sounds too simple? Well, unfortunately, it isn’t.

Think of the size of today’s corporate digital ecosystem. With something as huge as the modern enterprise environment,  a highly complex IGA solution should be put to practice to correlate and monitor employee identities throughout its network.

Granting permission and access to employees where you weren’t supposed to will make you more prone to vulnerabilities and throw you amidst expensive data breaches.

Why aren’t enterprises taking identity governance more seriously?

Enterprises are rightfully incorporating identity management into their networks. After all, data breaches start with identity and have the potential to put an entire organization’s cybersecurity in jeopardy. 

But as the capacity of IAM and access management is on the rise, identity governance  - a major branch of identity security remains neglected. In fact, a lot of enterprises do not understand its significance and what it can offer.

4 Reasons Why Most Enterprises Neglect Identity Governance

Here are four possible reasons behind its negligence. Let’s address them one by one.

1. Lack of visibility: You cannot protect something that you can’t see. Any unknown user that has access to your network represents a blind spot or security hole.

So how will you determine what permission to give and what to avoid? The answer is, sadly you can’t. These orphaned accounts linger in your network unmonitored.

2. Seems confusing: Gartner states, “50% of IGA deployments are in distress.” Most organizations do not prefer because they are generally difficult to deploy and replace. 

We recommend cloud solutions instead of on-premise ones. They deploy faster and upgrade more easily. 

3. Managing is too tiresome: Maintaining cybersecurity requires constant attention and awareness. Once achieved, your enterprise is entitled to benefits like delegated access and role management. Lack of governance may result in identity security holes.

4. Do not understand the concept: IGA makes it easier to handle thousands of identities and other security tools. The best capabilities are role management and centralized access requests. 

9 Key Features of an Identity Governance Tool

Looking around for options before landing in the perfect IGA capability? Here’s are the basic features that every enterprise-level tool should include. 

* User provisioning: It gives new users or existing users upgrading to new roles the privileges they should have and detain those that they won't need. This reduces the burden off business owners to a large extent. 

* Self-service enablement: It enables users to submit their access requests and subsequently track the approval process. IGA tools also offer automated workflows for password or username recovery and profile management.

* Privileged account governance: It offers privileged account access in a simplified format. But because of the greater risk involved, make sure that the tool has proportionately better controls.

* Access certification: It assists business owners with risk-based prioritization by sorting the right people who should have access to specific enterprise resources. 

* Policy automation: It ensures that the access reviews and certifications offered are in-line with cybersecurity practices and business policies.

* Role-based access management: It offers access to users based on their roles in the company. For instance, in the case of fine-grained access rights for level-one accountants, because of hierarchical and inheritable access permissioning, access rights will be given to all accountants in the company and not just level-one accountants. 

* Reporting and dashboarding: It provides customized dashboards based on access by users, certifications, entitlements, and resources respectively.

* Integration with IAM tools: Lastly, it should integrate with traditional IAM tools.

Conclusion

Identity is crucial to any organization. The ability to be able to control who comes in and out is the ultimate driver in determining how secure your environment is. Getting your enterprise the right identity governance and administration solution should do the trick.