Identity governance solutions help businesses efficiently manage user access to applications and other network resources over the lifecycle of each user identity. Granting access and maintaining visibility over that access and ensuring compliance with internal and external policies is a full-time job. Too much reliance on manual identity governance is expensive, inefficient, and risky.
If you’re looking for an identity governance solution, it’s important to do your due diligence. You need a tool capable of handling governance in a hybrid IT environment with both on-premise and cloud applications. Your employees, contractors, and business partners need to access these different services in a secure way. This article highlights five things to look for in an identity governance solution.
1. Visibility
The first and most pressing need for an identity governance solution is to provide full visibility over who has access to what resources. The longer employees work with a company, the more diverse the number of applications and resources they’ll have requested access to. Lacking visibility over this access introduces information security risks.
Another important part of visibility is being able to see how user access is actually being used. Without this type of visibility, inappropriate access or rogue behavior goes unseen.
Furthermore, provisioning inefficiencies can start to pile up with users having access to resources that they don’t even use in their jobs. Orphaned accounts, which are accounts with no valid user, can go undetected.
2. Connectivity
You can’t get full visibility over user access without connectivity to all sources of identity on the network. From applications to databases to directories, it’s critical for your identity governance solution to have excellent connectivity to any IT resource where user identities are represented in the form of a user account.
Legacy identity governance solutions lack good connectivity to all business applications and services. Integration is notoriously tough to achieve using these monolithic applications. The result is that you end up with identity silos.
Whether through API calls, proprietary connectors, standards-based connectors, or custom code, you should choose an identity governance solution that is able to integrate with applications and ingest all relevant data sources around identity and access for enterprise-wide visibility.
3. Automation
Legacy identity governance processes and solutions tend to lack the agility and scalability that companies need to handle user access in their dynamic environments.
This dynamism isn’t limited to the increased use of cloud services. As evidenced during the pandemic, people’s workplace habits can change overnight. Outside contractors and consultants come and go all the time.
One way a modern identity governance solution can meet the need for greater agility and scalability is through automation. Automated provisioning can use policy-based rules to grant user access to IT resources without the laborious, time-consuming manual provisioning that overburdens IT admin. The rules can take into account the user’s role, location, and other contextual risk factors.
Automation also adds value for governance at the end of the user lifecycle when they no longer need access or they leave the organization. It’s critical for security that access accounts are immediately disabled in these circumstances.
Manual deprovisioning often fails to catch some of these accounts because of the difficulty of tracking everything. An identity governance solution should provide automated deprovisioning across your hybrid cloud and on-premise environment.
4. AI-Powered
At the heart of many innovative modern enterprise solutions is artificial intelligence. AI-powered identity governance is a game-changer in terms of its ability to monitor identity and access and empower the scalability that companies need.
Leveraging the power of machine learning lets you effortlessly manage and monitor user access patterns across the entire enterprise. This analytics-driven monitoring uses algorithms that can analyze identity data and provide metrics-based decision support.
As a machine learning model continuously ingests identity data, it provides even better insights. You can rapidly find high-risk and unauthorized user access across the entire enterprise, which improves both information security and compliance.
With high-confidence and low-risk access decisions automated via an analytics engine, IT teams can focus more time on other value-added identity management tasks.
5. Full Lifecycle Management
The fifth feature to look for in an identity governance solution is full lifecycle management. Businesses need the ability to manage user access from pre-hire to hire to role changes to termination.
Overburdened IT helpdesks can’t cope with the pace of access requests and access changes that happen on a daily basis. They also need to revoke access when people leave or when they lose a device. Not only does this mean security risks, but it also damages productivity.
Your chosen identity governance solution should provide its automation capabilities across the entire identity lifecycle. Full lifecycle management makes your IT teams far more efficient while boosting security.
How Tuebora Helps
From visibility to automation, Tuebora’s solution uses machine learning to deliver everything your business needs for modern identity governance. Scalability, agility, efficiency, and compliance—Tuebora has you covered.
Try Tuebora today: get your demo here.
P.S. We’ll be at Identiverse June 21-24 and would love to see you there! Join us at booth #1207 to learn about Tuebora’s Self-Driven Identity and Access Management and register to win an Apple Watch Series 7 and the chance to pilot a stunt plane with SkyCombatAce in our give-away!