Establishing a Modern-Day Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) Framework

The rapid cloudification of enterprise IT coupled with a ‘new normal’ that encourages more work-from-home and hybrid situations has put a strain on Identity and Access Management (IAM) systems and services. Identity is the new perimeter, but we must govern and secure this critical asset. Changes in IAM requirements, increased scale and needing to make faster access decisions across increasingly complex heterogeneous environments is driving new approaches within Identity Governance and Administration (IGA). At its core, IGA provides a consistent framework for operationally managing and governing our expanding digital ecosystem. With more distribution and delegation of administration, IGA better ensures appropriate access, and the execution of management controls when and where it is needed.

As a critical component of IAM, IGA combines entitlement discovery, decision-making processes, access request/review workflows and certification, along with identity lifecycle and role management and access compliance reporting. IGA operates in the intersection of business process management and access automation allowing people and systems to communicate with each other, fulfilling day-to-day operational needs.

With such a distributed, at-home, or remote workforce becoming the norm, IGA is focused on addressing issues related to the mapping of business objectives to policies as well as creating a platform for the execution and administration of these policies. IGA is a bridge between business decision makers and those that administer technology in managing all aspects of governance. In this report, we will describe a set of emerging enterprise requirements, a Reference Architecture for IGA in the enterprise, typical use cases to consider, a vendor evaluation checklist, real world vendor examples and a cloud-aware deployment strategy. We will also describe personnel and organizational factors critical to create a sustainable IGA program