When you’re trying to get somewhere fast, you need to know that your car has good brakes. In this instance, you’re not always trying to stop the car but to maintain control as you move forward. Would you want to drive at a high speed with worn-out brakes, knowing the risks? Whether it’s red lights, pedestrians crossing the street or sudden sharp turns, the ability to adjust quickly is non-negotiable.
There’s a metaphor here for enterprise IT. To succeed in today’s dynamic environments, you need to stay in the driver’s seat and make confident decisions. We are living amid a period of great digital transformation, where being online means much more than having a website. By far the most value-generating activities depend on having a viable IT infrastructure, especially in this era of cross-enterprise-collaboration.
Many business aspects – like the systems that you’re using, the suppliers you’re working with or the business models – are constantly changing. To allow effective and secure collaboration, the control of identities within your organization becomes of paramount relevance – whether those are employees, interns or third-party contractors. Identity governance is essential for both identity security and compliance, ensuring you’re able to make confident decisions about who has access to what and when.
Approaches to identity management are evolving in lockstep with the acceleration of digital transformation. Modern Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) solutions can be simple, agile and scalable, allowing confident Identity and Access decisions throughout these changes without jeopardizing your IT. Let’s explore the challenges and opportunities of a modern IGA approach.
The benefits of a modern IGA approach
Organizations are undergoing a massive amount of digital transformation, which typically involves upgrading systems and changing how people work with each other. This process is better enabled with next-generation Identity Management, which meets the need for automation and quicker decision-making.
You need to be cautious and judicious about IGA; you can’t just deploy everything to every employee. The risk related to doing that is much higher than it was in the past. There is a great deal of misuse, malicious insiders, conflicts of interest, and a variety of threats and attacks. You need an IGA approach that gives you effective governance and reliability that will put you in control.
Getting common controls like managing Joiner, Mover, and Leaver scenarios effectively allows you to go much deeper, at a faster pace. An increasing number of vendors provide best practices that have matured over many years, designed to meet usability and security standards of global enterprises, and that are constantly refined, reacting to new regulations and threats.
The reliability and stability of next-generation IGA allows you to tick the compliance boxes with ease and then go further to gain additional value from the product: risk management, role modeling, separation of duties, chasing orphan accounts, non-human identities and attribute- or policy-based access controls. These traditionally advanced requirements are now available much faster to a much broader set of customers.
The world of work has shifted. Contractors, suppliers and other external relationships have increased and now play a bigger role within many companies. You can leverage solutions that support these interactions while staying focused on your core business. If someone is a contractor rather than an employee, they may still need access to your internal systems. That could cause a lack of governance and security, that you can address more quickly now with modern IGA.
Three key points about next-gen IGA
Identity management professionals have many decisions to make about who gets access to what. With so many requests for access coming in, the tendency is to rubber-stamp approvals and hope for the best. But this is not only creating access creep, it also has a negative impact on your data quality. Too much access violates the principle of least privilege and lessens the ability to build effective roles with AI/ML because your data doesn’t represent your business needs. By improving the quality of your decisions, you will have more effective access management, greater efficiency and speed, and a significant uplift in user experience.
Modern identity management allows the confident oversight of an enterprise’s many identities. It contributes to a stable IT function, one that can adjust to modern demands and stay agile – that is, not monolithic and leverages best practices where possible. You have more in common with other enterprises than you think; leverage that commonality so you don’t end up with an expensive and hard-to-use bespoke system.
Many transformation projects are slow, and there are too many hard-wired or script-based infrastructure components. One example of the old, monolithic approach was Lotus Notes, where there was a mail client with highly customized databases as part of the product. Organizations invested in the customization of the integrated functionality, stranding them with outdated mail functionality and an inability to innovate at a reasonable cost. With the shift to a cloud-first paradigm, organizations can work more dynamically, make the best use of their assets and reduce project time.
Finally, digital transformation requires increasingly business-oriented and agile cybersecurity. IGA is a key part of this. As your business expands, you will have more digital assets and thus more identities (users, devices, applications) to manage. This expands the attack surface, and your IGA solution helps you to keep up with business demands while enforcing access policies that reduce risk and support agility.
Controlling your acceleration
In the same way as the roads you are using are rarely straight, the evolution of your enterprise is rarely a straight line. Business models are dynamic, and there will always be bumps, twists, turns – trends, and opportunities. Businesses that can quickly adjust their business model around market needs will have a competitive edge and reduce their business risk.
You don’t get to build the roads, but you can prepare for a curvy road. Install better brakes so you can control the vehicle – your business – because you can’t afford to crash or be slower than your competition. As long as you’re not in control of the market, as long as you can’t pave straight roads, make sure that your IT, the backbone of your business stays agile, in control of Identity Access via modern IGA so that your IT supports better, safer and faster decisions that will help to accelerate your digital success.
