3 Steps to Understanding Why Your Business Needs IGA

By the end of this article, you’ll have a three-step explanation of why Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) is necessary for business optimisation:

How does IGA link to your business performance?
What are the risks of not having IGA?
What are your options for an IGA solution?

Identity governance can sound intangible and difficult to conceptualise but here’s a comprehensible overview of what you need to know.

IGA and your business performance

Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) sits at the centre of all your users, applications, and data in your organisation. So, it’s important to say the least. And it can save you a lot of manual labour costs in the long run by automating tasks for the IT team.

IGA involves the processes that ensure the smooth-running of access to applications and infrastructure for all the employees in your organisation. Let’s take one use case – joiner, mover, leaver – to demonstrate how good IGA allows for an immediately productive workforce:

When a new employee joins, they automatically get access to everything they need to begin their job – they no longer have to wait for days before they can be productive. When an employee changes role, their access rights change so they can immediately start their new role and don’t have unnecessary access. When an employee leaves, their access is removed so they no longer have access to the organisation’s data and applications (and any customer data you manage).

Having your identity and access processes set up is fundamental to seamless business operations and high productivity. Your helpdesk isn’t faced with a recurring influx of tickets from employees requesting access approval, and you aren’t at risk of access falling into the wrong hands. This leads us onto the risks of not having IGA.

What happens when you don’t have an IGA solution?

What you don’t want in your business is a high risk of data breach. As your company grows and more employees join, it becomes impossible to remember who’s got access to what, who grants what access, was it appropriate and who revokes it when an employee changes role or leaves. Suddenly you find yourself with undefined access permissions and chaotic systems and you could fail a compliance audit. You’re not the only organisation with these challenges – that’s why we’re here talking about IGA.

Let’s say you have no IGA process in place to remove the access of ex-employees and human error results in this access being forgotten about. Your data and applications are now in the hands of someone who could potentially want to cause damage to your organisation…not an ideal scenario. Not only is this a risk for data breach, but unauthorised access could also result in a failed compliance audit and expensive fines.

Transfer, manage or accept the risk?

We’ve outlined the risks of not having an IGA solution, but what now?

You could accept the risk and potential consequences and continue without a solution. Funnily enough, we don’t recommend this option.

You could manage the risk by speaking to a team of experts to advise on a solution. This is recommended for organisations looking for a highly customised solution, which could be implemented as part of a project and fully managed with a support team either in-house or outsourced.

Or if you just want to move the risk outside your organisation – transfer it by using a fully-managed SaaS solution with built-in best practices. You can relax knowing everything is under control within days of set-up. This gives you the core access control processes you need to be compliant, but not every customised widget. Most organisations are struggling with the core control processes due to complexity and skilled resource constraints – so make sure you get the fundamentals right first! And with a true turnkey SaaS solution with no coding required and your problems taken away, it’s the simplest option.

To sum up, here are the benefits of having an IGA solution, the risks of not having an IGA solution, and your possibilities for tackling your challenges:

IGA improves business performance and productivity through automated identity and access processes, resulting in reduced costs for the IT helpdesk and seamless business operations.
Not having IGA could lead to data breach, failed compliance audit, high helpdesk costs and a chaotic system of identity and access.
Transfer the risk with a cloud-native fully managed SaaS solution, manage the risk with an IGA solution implemented by a team of experts, or accept the risk – good luck!

For a more in-depth look at Identity Governance and Administration, download our 18-page guide here.

Or to talk to one of our team about Intragen’s offerings, click here.