IGA Has Failed—What is the Best Path Forward?

We start with the premise that Identity Governance and Administration (IGA), touted as the way to answer  “Who Has Access to What?” has largely failed to achieve the results most enterprises expected over the past 25 years. IGA was initially introduced to improve the provisioning process, but it has evolved over the years to include entitlement discovery, decision-making processes, access request/review workflows and certification, along with risk scoring, identity lifecycle/role management and access compliance reporting. IGA operates at the intersection of business process management and access automation.

To be fair, the expectations of IGA have been really high and the blending of complex technology across heterogeneous environments coupled with direct business impact is really difficult to manage…and it won’t get easier as cyberattacks become more and more sophisticated.

While IGA has not met expectations, we’ll describe some of the key challenges, but more importantly, a path forward for vendors and enterprises to achieve successful IGA programs.