The Urgency of Avoiding Flawed IGA Implementation

What exactly is Identity Governance and Administration (IGA)? 

Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) enables secure processes and high business performance through identity-led processes in an organisation. With IGA correctly implemented, an organisation increases its compliance, boosts its security against breaches and gains efficiency by automating processes. For example, when a new employee joins the company for a specific role, the employee will automatically receive all the correct access belonging to the specific role. 

Common Pitfalls 

When implementing IGA in your organisation, there are a lot of potential pitfalls. 

• Lack of cooperation within an IGA team and its business stakeholders 

The most common pitfall is that organisations assume the IT team can implement and solve IGA on their own. For example, a lack of cooperation with stakeholders could result in an incorrect implementation of business roles if the organisational structure is not familiar within the IT team. This leads to a lack of automated access in the organisation (or in worst-case scenario, wrong access) and users are subsequently forced to request the remaining access rights manually. Business application owners could also lose control over their managed applications and the overview of all provisioned access for the application. 

• IGA is a dynamic process, not a static state 

For a dynamic business, IGA always needs to adapt to organisational changes. With new implemented applications or business roles, it is often forgotten that IGA always needs to be up to date to be fully secure against potential breaches.

• High costs 

Considering IGA is a dynamic process with potentially complex application integrations, the duration of the project and hence the costs can increase quickly without IGA specialists involved. Furthermore, due to the scarcity of IGA specialists, it’s very common to require a lot of IT team training. When ignoring the need for IGA trainings or hiring an IGA specialist, a wrongly implemented IGA solution will again lead to high costs. Whether using in-house or outsourced expertise, Agile working is the best approach for efficiency and visibility of the project in hand by ensuring strong time management. The Agile approach involves close collaboration throughout the project and tasks are discussed in frequently occurring “sprint” meetings to keep time and cost to a minimum. 

How to avoid implementation problems 

1. Alignment of the IT-team and stakeholders with the goal of the project and its correct implementations. 
   
   
2. Understand the business value and clear timeline of IGA implementation to prevent unexpected costs and a wrong view of the goal and how to achieve it. 
   
   
3. Work with an IGA specialist or support from an IGA consultancy to mitigate errors on the implementation and increase efficiency during the project. 

At Intragen we understand the risks and costs of a poor IGA implementation. You can trust us to advise the best possible solution, whether that be an expert team to carry out an end-to-end IGA project, or a SaaS solution, such as Intra1. Get in touch today for advice on maximising ROI on your IGA solution and avoiding unnecessary costs.