Integral Partners is a specialized consulting firm with extensive experience in deploying Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) solutions in large and small environments across many sectors. We have created a four-part series to discuss three critical engagement areas many organizations struggle with when deploying IGA solutions.
Our experience, obtained through hundreds of IGA engagements, offers guidance on how to successfully navigate critical IGA challenges with:
- Executive sponsorship/user adoption
- Ongoing operational support
- Optimized tool configuration
IGA solutions are generally deployed as the foundational piece of an Identity and Access Management (IAM) program. IGA supports many key functions related to identity in an organization. Features of IGA tools include the ability to:
- Provision new users of common apps, often using pre-defined roles
- Request, approve, and provision users for applications and other resources (and track those requests and approvals)
- Change users’ access as they change roles in the company
- Report on users’ access to meet compliance needs
- Eliminate users’ access to all resources when they exit the company
When deployed correctly, IGA solutions automate many functions as well as enforcing compliance rules for access and meeting regulatory requirements for tracking access to sensitive data.
Putting vendor technology in place is relatively easy compared to making the changes to workflows and behaviors impacted by IGA automation. In addition to technical focus on operational maintenance requirements and tool configuration collaboration, organizations need to be proactive in gaining adoption and engagement outside IT to realize success. In order to support your IGA project you must be prepared to address some key challenges:
Sponsorship and adoption
Get sponsorship at the top of the organization. Do this by having a constant educational partnership with leaders to introduce them to IAM and inform them of its purpose and the value it can deliver. Also, ensure proper engagement in the project by defining with them their role to push the project along and remove obstacles.
Operational support
Once deployed, IGA platforms require ongoing “care and feeding” to stay current and operational. This is another challenge often underestimated in IGA planning.
Tool Configuration
Moving beyond organizational alignment and operational support, optimizing an IGA solution requires technical collaboration and coordination. Configuring the tool properly relies heavily upon proper stakeholder management, full requirements-gathering, and testing prior to going live. Missing steps in any of these phases can mean a poorly deployed tool that does not meet expectations and fails to deliver promised value.
Thoughtfully and collaboratively implemented, IGA is a powerful tool which delivers measurable security, compliance, operational and business value across the organization. We will address each of these key challenge in more depth in subsequent post.
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