Identity governance and administration (IGA) is a critical aspect of cybersecurity initiatives. It is one of the most significant components in creating and maintaining a productive and secure work environment. However, many IGA projects fail due to a lack of careful planning and critical oversights. Now is the perfect time to reverse this trend and begin unlocking meaningful business value through a well-executed identity governance and administration deployment.
Make no mistake: running an effective IGA initiative takes effort, but when done correctly, it will safeguard and improve your organization. In an era where data is both an asset and a concern, IGA is the key to protecting your data while facilitating development. As you begin your IGA journey, it is critical to identify and understand five major problems that might impede the success of your identity governance implementation, as well as how to efficiently overcome them.
Key concerns in IGA deployments
1) Integration with target applications
Organizations frequently have numerous authoritative sources for Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) implementations, each delivering distinct identity data. For example, employee data is often obtained from HR systems, although data for contractors or seasonal labor may originate from a variety of sources. It is critical to identify these sources early in the deployment process in order to minimize problems caused by inaccurate or obsolete data. Inconsistent regulations might eventually result in fragmented and useless identity data, affecting rollout timescales. To achieve success, organizations should conduct a thorough review of identity data from all authoritative sources before implementation, with an emphasis on data quality and consistency. IAM leaders must collaborate with source owners to guarantee data integrity and timely updates. To avoid processing concerns, update frequencies should be validated and documented on a regular basis, as well as checked for faults at random. In rare circumstances where no authoritative sources exist, the IGA system may become the official source, necessitating the same stringent data control procedures.
2) Ensure entitlement descriptions are clear and accurate
Historically, entitlement descriptions frequently fail to accurately portray the access and permission levels given inside a system, resulting in confusion and misconceptions. System administrators and application owners commonly set entitlements with cryptic descriptions, such as numeric values or project numbers, resulting in inaccurate and unclear data in IGA systems. This can have serious consequences during access certification reviews, compliance reporting, and access requests. To guarantee deployment success, organizations should institute a review process to verify that entitlement descriptions are clear, accurate, and useful.
3) Prioritize use cases and scope
A typical error during IGA deployment is attempting to address too many use cases at once. This can result in scope creep, over complication, and a lengthier, more challenging implementation process. It is vital to priorities the most critical use cases initially, such as role-based access control or automated provisioning, and then progressively broaden the scope as the system matures. Starting small, with a well-defined scope, allows for faster deployment and early wins that can be built on later.
4) Keep track of identity attributes
Organizations that add new applications and retire old ones without updating application inventory or identity attribute mapping documentation risk losing track of what attributes are being populated across various applications, data lakes, and identity stores, reducing IGA capabilities. To avoid this, it is critical to establish and maintain an identity attribute mapping catalog. This catalog should include feedback from important players such as application owners, system administrators, and stakeholders involved in the first deployment. It should document the present identity data, how it maps between systems, and how each attribute is meant to be used. Maintaining this catalog enables the IAM team to better understand the flow of identity data, maintain regulatory compliance, visualize workflows, and prevent identity data threats. Success requires regular stakeholder assessments, clearly defined responsibilities, and a focused approach to catalog building.
5) Properly document use cases
A successful IGA deployment requires well-defined use case documentation, which offers a clear foundation for system construction and continuing administration. Without acceptable use case documentation, implementing and sustaining an IGA system is significantly more difficult. The IAM team must work with system owners, application administrators, and stakeholders to develop and validate these use cases, bearing in mind that various groups may have different business objectives and expectations. Each use case should have common aspects such as the target audience, workflow summaries, stakeholder information, identification characteristics, and life cycle activities. Keeping the documentation clean and straightforward is critical for minimizing misunderstanding and deployment delays. In addition, a review mechanism should be developed to guarantee that the use case documentation is up to date, with regular meetings to confirm correctness. This guarantees that new IGA upgrades, workflows, and onboarding procedures are implemented fast and efficiently.
Conclusion
An effective IGA deployment necessitates careful consideration of integration problems, data complexity, use case prioritization, regulatory compliance, and security considerations. Addressing these important facets promotes a smoother deployment and increases the IGA solution's efficacy in protecting sensitive information and streamlining identity management operations.