Digital transformation has accelerated the speed of business evolution. As organizations accelerate these projects, their IT environments have become dramatically more complex. Hackers and other malicious actors are ready to take advantage of organizations that do not ensure their security postures can scale to the challenges these new complexities create. To meet tougher security demands, organizations must have the capacity to onboard and update identities and applications safely and expeditiously in these new environments. Failing to apply modern IGA best practices to accomplish this slows the time-to-value of innovations and squanders the technological advantage they create. Organizations must implement a modern Identity and Governance Administration (IGA) solution that delivers sufficient functionality to manage identities, permissions, and access in real time to make users, devices, and applications productive on day one.
Identify critical identity governance challenges in new environments
IT and business leaders must determine the inherent risks of any solution they adopt that touches core business applications. Can they still get data and process it in real-time to meet identity governance and compliance requirements? Can users and applications contribute safely and securely right away?
A modern IGA built leveraging a cloud-native architecture provides the foundation required to onboard users and applications faster and enables identity governance to scale to support organization-wide identity lifecycle management.
What should organizations look for in a modern IGA solution?
Scalable onboarding speed
It’s been reported in many places that the typical enterprise has over 100 applications in use. Throughout a single project lifecycle, a team may need to onboard and offboard hundreds of new entities. In many instances, legacy IGA systems cannot onboard all users and provision them based on limitations to the IGA solution. Modern IGA will flex to manage this process in real-time across the organization by generating an efficient data pipeline that provides ongoing updates for user access and streamlines identity lifecycle management. This mitigates productivity loss by rapidly provisioning access to directly impact the bottom line. It also increases security. Consider de-provisioning, for example. The deprovisioning goal for the termination of standard access with legacy IGA can be a manual process is often within a 8 hour window. Imagine the damage that can occur in that window if the individual was terminated and had privileged access to critical systems. A modern IGA platform must be able to onboard new identities and de-provision in real time and scale to accommodate complexities, like adding thousands of new identities at one time in an acquisition.
Capacity to leverage AI and machine learning
When auditors are sitting at their desks, compliance and governance professionals must be able to demonstrate they can satisfy all mandates and requirements. They must show their IGA solution protects their customers and organizational data. The modern IGA platform does the hard work of processing massive amounts of data and algorithms and operationalizing it to enable AL and ML to leverage data to demonstrate compliance and improve overall enterprise security. An open flexible data model in a modern IGA platform enables organizations to embed AI across their identity ecosystem and manage application access.
A modern IGA solution can also leverage ML and AI to embed functions like role mining. This makes it possible to make the right decision on access rights and role definitions for the organization in real time.
Faster data ingestion for faster IGA
Real time IGA provides a continuous flow of user identity data that feeds into an event-driven system that then streams the data through different stages to make it available faster. It can merge multiple authoritative sources into one employee record.
Real-time IGA also enables organizations to import data in two ways: a full import or a delta import. Full import looks at all the data that is in the system. Delta import determines if a record has changed and only processes records that have changed. This significantly reduces the time until records are available and manageable in the IGA platform.
Leverage an identity analytics platform
As business becomes more complex, organizations must move beyond simple reporting to an advanced identity analytics platform. Knowing who has access to what and for how long requires being able to prove it. A modern IGA enables organizations to customize and schedule reports and manage compliance reporting data right out of the box, and a user-friendly analytics platform helps organizations present reports that reflect the state of identity governance within the organization.
To learn more about Successful Real-Time IGA and the solutions offered by Omada, please visit our website.
About the Author: With over 25 years of global experience in cybersecurity and a focus on Identity & Access Management, Paul Walker is a seasoned professional known for his exceptional communication and problem-solving skills. Currently serving as a Field Strategist at Omada, he brings a wealth of expertise in value selling, product growth, and IAM solution evangelism. Paul has held key positions at Clear Skye, One Identity, and Dell, consistently driving technical strategy and maintaining impactful relationships with customers and partners throughout his distinguished career.
About the Company: Omada, a global market leader in Identity Governance and Administration (IGA), offers a full-featured, cloud native IGA solution that enables organizations to achieve compliance, reduce risk, and maximize efficiency. To ensure successful deployment in 12 weeks, Omada’s Accelerator package provides a reliable starting point for IGA projects with a standardized implementation approach, best-practice framework for process design, and training for efficient user adoption. Founded in 2000, Omada delivers innovative identity management to complex hybrid enterprise environments globally.
