Identity governance solutions typically integrate with systems and applications to provide centralized visibility for current access privileges by aggregating and correlating identity data. These solutions automate labor-intensive processes like access certifications and password management, cutting operational costs.

Strong identity governance practices can help ensure organizations’ security, compliance, and overall data integrity. Here are some key points to consider as you start down the path to Identity Governance:

Defining Identity Management

Effective governance requires a framework that supports identifying, certifying and managing user accounts, privileges, roles and access requests. Identity governance automates labor-intensive processes and offers a business-friendly user interface, which helps lower operational costs. A good identity governance framework also reduces risk and strengthens security.

Identity governance aligns security with business requirements by enforcing policies, conducting access reviews and providing easy compliance reporting. It helps control privileged access to critical systems, prevents unauthorized activity and minimizes the impact of data breaches.

For example, suppose an IT admin grants an employee a new role requiring sensitive system access. In that case, it’s important that the system automatically triggers an access review and notification. This alerts the appropriate business application owner so the IT administrator can request or grant access as needed based on the role and its responsibilities.

It also ensures proper access rights are in place to comply with regulations such as GDPR and HIPAA. Meeting global privacy mandates with a well-established governance framework is possible.

Identifying Users

In complex IT environments, user accounts and access privileges become scattered across on-premises and cloud applications. This creates security risks and makes meeting compliance requirements like those set by NIST for least privilege security challenging.

Implementing an identity governance framework is the key to mitigating these security risks. It helps organizations manage user account provisioning, password management, policy management, and access reviews for both on-premises and cloud applications. It also helps them satisfy attestation and recertification initiatives and easily provides managers with a clear view of their governance posture.

Identity governance solutions provide centralized visibility for all users and access to on-premises and cloud applications, data files, and systems. This unified view allows authorized IT and business users to pinpoint high-risk employee groups and quickly identify potential policy violations, weak controls, or inappropriate access privileges – and take action to resolve them before they cause serious damage to your organization.

Identifying Access Rights

With more and more data stored and accessed across multiple systems and devices, identity management solutions must ensure authorized users have timely access to the right applications and information. When users have excessive or inappropriate access, it opens the door to security breaches and compliance violations.

Defining and enforcing governance policies, such as those that enforce segregation of duties (SoD), limiting access to sensitive information, and requiring regular review of entitlements, is essential to the identity governance process. These policies also help organizations meet compliance mandates, such as those set by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and HIPAA.

In addition to providing visibility into user entitlements, identity governance tools can provide centralized provisioning, enabling users to be added to or have their access permissions revoked for many different systems and services from a single system.

This reduces the time it takes to manage access across the organization and ensures policy enforcement consistency. In addition, these solutions offer robust auditing and reporting capabilities to support compliance and audit needs. Many of these technologies are cloud-based services, eliminating the need to invest in on-prem infrastructure.

Defining Permissions

To mitigate the threat of unauthorized access, identity governance defines a set of rules to limit the number of privileges granted to users. Using a set of streamlined processes, policies, and advanced technologies, identity governance empowers organizations to control the entire access ecosystem and ensure that user accounts are not being used to gain access to sensitive systems or data.

To achieve this, identity governance solutions use centralized visibility of the current access state by aggregating and correlating data from multiple systems, applications and resources into a single repository. This data is then analyzed to determine the current state of access.

This enables users to create a governance framework that enforces policies during provisioning, access requests and password changes, conducts access reviews and certifications, and supports compliance reporting.

Privileged access management is a critical component of governance because it relates to the administrator rights given to users with administrative roles or credentials in the enterprise. These rights, when mismanaged, can lead to serious security breaches and expensive downtime. Identity governance tools can automate the time-consuming tasks of granting and rescinding privileges, cutting operational costs and minimizing security risks.

Defining Administrative Rights

With the increasing digitization of business processes and data, the security workforce must track who has access to applications and sensitive data in on-premises and remote environments. A mishandled user account can result in a data breach or cyber-attack, leaving the company vulnerable to regulatory compliance violations and fines.

An identity governance and administration (IGA) solution is an important component of any cybersecurity strategy, helping to mitigate threats by ensuring that only the right users are granted access to critical systems. This can also help organizations meet industry mandates and regulations such as HIPAA, SOX, and eIDAS to ensure data is protected.

An effective IGA solution provides centralized visibility for all access privileges on an ongoing basis by aggregating and correlating identity data across on-premises and cloud applications, databases, files and devices to understand who has what access.

This is accomplished by establishing a role, policy and risk model. This allows faster and more accurate provisioning and streamlined reviews and certifications by delivering pre-defined, role-based access privileges. This approach is essential to identity governance and provides a more efficient way to manage privileged access, improve productivity and lower risk.