Identity Governance Access Management
Identity governance is at the center of most organizations’ security and IT operations strategies. It allows businesses to provide automated access to an ever-growing number of technology assets, while at the same time managing potential security and compliance risks. Identity governance enables and secures digital identities for all users, applications and data.
In a nutshell, identity governance brings three fundamental innovations to identity management:
- Centralized Visibility: Identity governance is designed for enterprise-wide visibility over corporate resources, which it achieves by aggregating and correlating identity data across cloud and datacenter environments. This creates a single authoritative view of “who has access to what.” Once the data is centralized, identity governance solutions enable business and IT users to identify risky employee populations, policy violations and inappropriate access privileges – and to remediate these risk factors.
- Business-friendly User Interfaces: Identity governance solutions are designed to be used by business users, a requirement for effective oversight and governance of identities. Business managers can request, approve or review access data using business-friendly UIs, with clear business context, to help simplify or explain technical data. And they can access business-friendly reports, dashboards and analytical tools, giving organizations the information and metrics they need to strengthen internal controls and reduce risk.
- Consistent Identity Processes Built on Governance Model: Identity governance solutions provide consistent business processes for reviewing, requesting and approving access, and for managing passwords, underpinned by a common policy, role and risk model. This governance foundation means processes are carried out accurately and efficiently, with consistent policy enforcement, role-based access control, risk management and auditability.
Identity governance can help your organization effectively address today’s complex business challenges, balancing four critical objectives:
- Strengthen security and lower risk. Compromised identities caused by weak, stolen or default user credentials are a growing threat to organizations. With the centralized visibility into identity and access data that identity governance delivers, you can promptly detect inappropriate access, policy violations or weak controls that put your organization at risk. Identity governance allows you to focus your time and efforts to address your most critical issues and promptly remediate any issues that are detected.
- Improve compliance and audit performance. Identity governance allows organizations to verify that the right controls are in place to meet the security and privacy requirements of regulations like SOX, HIPAA and GDPR. Getting better control of your identity and access data, including centrally defining policy and risk, and automating your access certification process, means replacing expensive paper-based and manual processes with automated tools. By doing so, not only can you significantly reduce the cost of compliance, you can also establish repeatable practices for a more consistent, auditable, reliable and easier-to-manage access certification effort.
- Deliver fast, efficient access to the business. By giving your users timely access to the resources they need to do their jobs, identity governance enables them to become productive more quickly – and to stay productive, no matter how much or how quickly their roles and responsibilities change. It also empowers business users to request access and manage passwords, reducing the workload on help desk and IT operations teams. And with automated policy enforcement, identity governance allows you to meet service level requirements without compromising security or compliance.
- Reduce operational costs. Identity governance automates labor-intensive processes such as access certifications, access request, password management, and provisioning to dramatically cut operational costs. It can significantly reduce the time your IT staff spends on administrative tasks, because it empowers business users to easily and independently request access, manage passwords and review access.