Improving Data Security: How Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) Compliments IAM

Identity, Governance, and Administration (IGA) is defined by Gartner as an “activity within the identity and access management function that concerns the governance and administration of a unique digital representation of a user, including all associated attributes and entitlements.” In simpler terms, IGA capabilities help organizations govern and monitor user activities inside the application to detect and respond to user behaviors or policy violations.

IGA is a superset of Identity and Access Management (IAM) and was born out of the need to extend data security and compliance practices within applications. IGA goes beyond IAM control measures to monitor user activity within a given application and implement controls that enable governance and policies at a granular level.

What Are the Benefits of Identity Governance Administration?

With the cost of data breaches increasing each year and mounting fines for not meeting the compliance requirements and mandates, implementing IGA solutions across your applications has many long-term benefits for any enterprise, both in terms of costs and security.

Implementing an IGA security framework helps organizations reduce operational costs, enhance security, and improve compliance by streamlining access management and enforcing security policies.

Reduce Costs

Identity governance and administration streamlines labor-intensive procedures like access certifications, access requests, password management, and provisioning. This results in a substantial reduction in operational expenses. It significantly decreases the time IT personnel devote to administrative duties and enables users to autonomously manage access requests, passwords, and access reviews.

Moreover, organizations gain access to informative dashboards and analytical tools, equipping them with the necessary information and metrics to reinforce internal controls and mitigate risks.

Enhance Security

Organizations face an increasing threat from compromised identities resulting from weak, stolen, or default user credentials. To address this risk, having centralized visibility is crucial. It provides a unified and authoritative view of “who has access to what,” enabling authorized users to identify and prevent inappropriate access, policy violations, or weak controls that pose a risk to the organization.

Identity governance and identity management solutions empower business and IT users to pinpoint high-risk employee groups, detect policy violations, identify inappropriate access privileges, and take necessary actions to mitigate these risk factors.

Improve Compliance

Identity governance and administration solutions enable organizations to implement appropriate controls to meet the security and privacy standards mandated by regulations such as SOX, HIPAA, and GDPR. These solutions establish consistent business processes for password management, access review, access requests, and approval, all supported by a unified policy, role, and risk framework.

By leveraging role-based and attribute-based access control, companies can reduce compliance costs while managing risks and establishing repeatable practices. This approach promotes consistency, facilitates auditability, and simplifies access certification efforts, resulting in a more efficient and manageable compliance process.

Increase Efficiency

IGA systems provide users with prompt access to the necessary resources for their job, enabling them to achieve productivity swiftly and maintain it even amidst role and responsibility fluctuations. Additionally, these systems empower business users to independently request access and manage passwords, relieving the burden on help desk and IT operations teams.

Furthermore, with automated policy enforcement, identity governance ensures that service-level requirements are met while upholding security and compliance standards. This integration of efficient access provisioning, self-service capabilities, and policy enforcement enables organizations to strike a balance between productivity and security.

Top Identity Governance and Administration Features

While each IGA solution can be different in its overall offerings, there are a few fundamental features that define most IGA solutions. They are:

Analytics and Reports

Identity governance and administration (IGA) solutions offer enhanced visibility into user accounts and activities, empowering security personnel to promptly detect security issues or risks and trigger alerts during high-risk scenarios. Additionally, these solutions can provide recommendations for security enhancements, initiate remediation processes, address policy violations, and generate comprehensive compliance reports.

Access Control (Role-based and Attribute-based)

Through role-based automation, teams can streamline access management by automatically adjusting a user’s role, ensuring that their new permissions are propagated across all platforms, even if the username remains unchanged. This capability reduces the occurrence of excessive permissions, promoting a more secure access control environment. Going one level deeper, attribute-based access controls can work alongside role-based controls to govern access down to the field level using context-aware policies based on factors like time of access, location, IP address, etc.

Separation of Duties (SoD)

Separation of Duties ensures that users with access privileges cannot carry out transactions when compliance dictates the need for a separation of powers. By implementing SoD, organizations can maintain a robust security posture and mitigate the risk of fraudulent activities. This is why the ability to detect and remediate SoD conflicts is a critical objective for any IGA solution.

User Access Certification

Also known as user access review, user access certification is a crucial compliance activity that helps keep provisioning in check by regularly asking business managers to verify access rights for every user in their team. IGA solutions enable security teams to conduct review campaigns across multiple applications and provide reviewers with access and role usage information to make informed decisions granting/revoking access.

Download Pathlock’s guide to 9 Best Practices for Implementing Segregation of Duties

What to Look for When Choosing IGA Software

IGA solutions can include a variety of features, and your individual compliance and security needs play a big part in deciding which one is right for you. However, having a list of must-have features helps you shortlist the best of what’s out there. So, here are six things to consider before you approve that PO:

Automates Processes

Manual access reviews are prone to errors. Instead, consider implementing automated access reviews that can identify and escalate high-risk requests for manual review. By leveraging automation, organizations can reduce the likelihood of human errors and ensure that critical access requests undergo thorough scrutiny.

Includes Artificial Intelligence

Implementing a risk quantification system can significantly improve an organization’s risk management practices. It is beneficial to seek analytics capabilities that provide data-driven insights for intelligent decision-making regarding the management of the identity lifecycle, certification campaigns, and access requests. By leveraging such analytics, organizations gain valuable information that aids in making informed decisions and effectively mitigating their security risks.

Provides Least-privilege Access

Implementing least-privilege access within applications ensures that employees have access only to the resources necessary for their tasks and that this access is regularly validated. Additionally, just-in-time provisioning can be employed to eliminate standing privileges, which grant users permanent access to systems or data and pose a risk to organizations.

Scales with Your Company

When considering identity governance and administration (IGA) solutions, it is crucial to prioritize scalability to accommodate the increasing number of employees, vendors, and applications within an organization. As businesses expand, they not only add users but also diversify their technology stacks. With the growing reliance on cloud and hybrid architectures, it is essential to choose an IGA solution that can effectively maintain compliance across multiple systems.

Simplifies Data

Deploying technology that minimizes the dependence of IT stakeholders on manual analysis is crucial. By implementing such technology, organizations can simplify their governance program and ensure that decision-making is more straightforward and effective. Accessing clear and comprehensible data provides enhanced control and empowers stakeholders to easily make informed decisions.

Uses a Risk-based Strategy

It is essential for an IGA solution to adopt risk-based decision-making when granting user privileges. This approach helps mitigate the accumulation of unnecessary access privileges that can occur after a project is completed or when an individual departs from the company. By implementing risk-based decision-making, organizations can ensure that access privileges are evaluated and adjusted based on the level of risk associated with each user.

How IGA Enhances Data Security In ERP Applications

Reduces Risk of Data Access

Traditional IAM solutions verify the user’s identity and, once verified, provide access to ERP applications based on the roles assigned to that specific user. Consequently, the user gains access to all authorizations allowed by their roles. The IAM solution has little to no control over what the user does once access has been granted. This creates a governance challenge and increases the overall risk significantly.

Pathlock Platform builds on existing Role-Based Access Controls (RBAC) to create a security layer based on the context of access, such as time, device, location, IP address, etc. Using Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC), Pathlock allows you to restrict and/or mask user access to sensitive data at the page and field level inside your ERP applications. Role management automation is a key component in ensuring that users have the appropriate access based on their roles and responsibilities.

Enables Layered, Policy-Based Security Controls

The ability to orchestrate and enforce policies within your ERP ecosystem is key to controlling user access to data and transactions. This is especially true when companies must follow mandatory data privacy regulations like CCPA, GDRP, and Sarbanes Oxley. Without the necessary governance and controls in place, companies could face audit failures and huge fines, not to mention the loss of customer trust.

Pathlock allows you to implement layered security controls within your ERP applications. The platform’s ability to mask data at the field level shields sensitive PII data like Social Security Numbers, bank account details, etc. While the Click-to-View feature allows users to view data when needed, it also creates an access log that helps security teams detect suspicious user activity. Pathlock also enables you to implement in-line authentication challenges to perform sensitive transactions. In addition to creating layered security controls, these features also provide a reliable audit trail and enhance compliance.

Streamlines User Authorizations

User authorization is an integral part of IAM, but once the authorizations have been granted, traditional IAM solutions offer minimal insights into how these authorizations are being used. Granting new authorizations to users, also known as user provisioning, is usually a manual process that directly impacts Segregation of Duties (SoD). In many companies, the volume of authorization requests that ERP admins receive is so overwhelmingly high that it results in users being over-provisioned, i.e., having more authorization than they need. This increases your overall data access risk and leads to SoD violations that eventually become the cause of serious compliance deviations and audit failures. 

To overcome this governance challenge, the Pathlock enables you to monitor authorization usage in real-time. The platform’s adaptive security provides a 360° view over authorization and behavior-based user activity to detect SoD violations while providing steps for remediation. Pathlock also automates the tediously manual ERP authorization management process while decreasing the risk to data access and enabling higher compliance standards.

Schedule a demo with our security experts to find out how Pathlock’s adaptive security enhances data security and compliance within your ERP applications.