Identity Governance and Administration

IGA

Identity IGA

Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) represents one of the fastest growing segments in enterprise cybersecurity, projected to expand from 7.95 billion USD to 27 billion USD by 2044, a compound annual growth rate of 15%. Yet despite this growth trajectory, most organizations still struggle with implementation, manual processes, and achieving tangible security and compliance outcomes. This paradox stems from treating IGA as a technology deployment rather than a strategic program that fundamentally transforms how enterprises manage identity risk

IGA solves an increasingly critical business problem: access chaos. In modern enterprises, user permissions accumulate across hundreds of applications. Some on-premises, others cloud-based, many hybrid. Employees change roles, contractors exit, departments reorganize. Without systematic governance, the result is predictable: orphaned accounts remain active, people retain excessive permissions long after their responsibilities shift, and when auditors arrive or breaches occur, the organization cannot demonstrate who had access to what, when, or why. IGA automates this governance function, creating the comprehensive visibility and control that today's threat landscape and regulatory frameworks demand.

What is IGA?

IGA combines two complementary functions that work in concert:

• Identity Administration: Focuses on execution and day-to-day operations. It automates the provisioning of user accounts, when employees join, updates access when they transition roles, and deprovisioning when they exit. It manages self-service capabilities, allowing users to reset passwords or request access without IT intervention, and maintains the technical accuracy of identity data across connected systems
• Identity Governance: Operates at the oversight and control level. It establishes and enforces policies that determine who should have access to what resources. It conducts regular access reviews to certify that entitlements remain appropriate, detects and prevents segregation of duties violations to inhibit fraud, generates audit trails for regulatory compliance, and uses analytics to identify abnormal access patterns indicating risk

The integration of these two functions is what distinguishes IGA from traditional identity and access management (IAM). Traditional IAM controls authentication (proving who you are) and provides SSO/MFA. IGA extends this to governance, ensuring not just that someone can log in, but that their access should be as they have it.

Why is it so important?

Three structural forces create urgency around IGA across enterprise organizations.

1. Explosive Application Growth: The average organization deploys 188 new applications annually. These span on-premises legacy systems, cloud SaaS, hybrid infrastructure, and custom-built tools. Each new application represents a new access decision: who can use it, at what permission level, for how long? Without systematic governance, this decision-making becomes ad-hoc, fragmented, and undocumented.
2. Regulatory and Compliance Convergence: Organizations now navigate overlapping frameworks (GDPR, HIPAA, SOX, SOC2, ISO27001, NIS2,...), and emerging sector-specific mandates. Each framework demands clear evidence of access controls: documented policies, proof of periodic reviews, audit trails showing who accessed what and when. Manual compliance processes drown IT and security teams in paperwork. IGA automates compliance evidence collection and reporting, turning compliance from an annual fire drill into a continuous state
3. Security Model Evolution: The principle of least privilege (ensuring users receive only the minimum access necessary for their job) has become a foundational best practice. Yet 60% of organizations cite high total cost of ownership in their current IGA solutions as a principal deficiency, meaning many enterprises operate without systematic least privilege enforcement. The consequence: compromised accounts become lateral movement highways across the enterprise.

Positioning Overview

• Large enterprises represent the core IGA market. They operate complex hybrid environments, multiple on-premises datacenters, multiple cloud providers, thousands of applications and thousands of identities. The sheer scale makes manual access management impossible. Large enterprises have dedicated security and compliance teams, executive board pressure to demonstrate governance, and budgets to invest in comprehensive solutions
• Mid-sized organizations represent a high-growth opportunity. They lack the dedicated IAM teams of large enterprises but face similar regulatory pressures. Cost considerations loom larger than at the enterprise level. Cloud-first adoption is more prevalent, meaning they often operate pure-cloud or cloud-primary architectures without the legacy system integration complexity of large enterprises. Position IGA to mid-market as a path to governance maturity without complexity. Emphasize cloud-native IGA solutions, rapid time-to-value, minimal customization, and managed services can reduce implementation burden.

Industry Verticals with Regulatory Intensity

• Banking, financial services and insurance: These organizations face the strictest regulatory regimes. They have a long history of regulatory audits and sophisticated compliance functions. Position IGA as the compliance automation engine in the identity landscape
• Healthcare: Healthcare faces explosive growth in cyberattacks targeting patient data and critical systems. This environment is becoming increasingly complex.
• IT and Telecom: These organizations manage the most complex application environments (cloud platforms, SaaS, on-premises infrastructure). Position IGA as the governance layer for hybrid multi-cloud environments.
• Government and Defense: Government agencies face frequent security compliance audits.

Specifics

Identity Lifecycle Management: The Foundation

Provisioning and Deprovisioning

Automated provisioning connects IGA to authoritative source systems (primarily HR systems but also Active Directory, Entra ID or other workforce directories). When a new employee record appears in HR, IGA triggers provisioning workflows that automatically create user accounts in connected applications based on predefined business rules.

The business rule typically maps employee attributes to permissions.

Deprovisioning mirrors the process. When HR records an employee exit, IGA automatically revokes access across all connected systems. Critical point: modern deprovisioning is real-time or near-real-time. Legacy systems took days or weeks; modern cloud-native IGA can deprovision within minutes of termination notification, dramatically reducing the window for malicious insider activity.

Joiner-Mover-Leaver Orchestration

"Joiner-Mover-Leaver" (JML) refers to the three lifecycle events that trigger access changes. Sophisticated IGA platforms treat these as coordinated processes:

• Joiner: New hire provisions all role-based access in one orchestrated process
• Mover: Role transition (e.g. engineer --> engineer manager) triggers simultaneous access changes. New access granted, old access revoked, ensuring no permission gap during transition
• Leaver: Termination triggers complete access removal and account disable across all systems simultaneously.

The value is operational: employees experience no delays moving to new roles, compliance risk from access gaps is eliminated, and IT ticket voume drops significantly

Entitlement Management: Granular Control

Definition and Scope

Entitlements are specific permissions within applications. It's not just "access to Salesforce" but "read-only access to customer records in BeNeLux region" or "ability to create opportunities but not delete them". Entitlements become more granular as applications are mature. Modern SaaS applications offer attribute-based access control (ABAC), where permissions vary based on user attributes (department, location, role, manager) and resource properties (sensitivity level, region).

IGA's entitlement management layer maps business roles to specific entitlements. When a user is assigned a business role, all entitlements provision automatically. If two roles conflict (fraud risk), IGA flags or prevents the assignment

Connectors: The Integration Bridge

Entitlement management requires bidirectional integration with applications. IGA platforms provide three categories of connectors

1. Native Connectors for enterprise systems: Active Directory, Entra ID, Exchange, SAP, Oracle, Salesforce
2. Starling Connect: using APIs to connect to SaaS applications without custom development

Technical Consideration: Application discovery and inventory. Before provisioning can work, the organization must catalog what applications exist, what connectors are available, and what entitlements each application exposes. Many IGA implementations stall here (not from technology issues but from organizational challenge). Business units own different applications and often lack complete entitlement documentation

Role-Based Access Control and Role Management

RBAC vs ABAC: The Evolution

Traditional RBAC assigns permissions based on a defined role: "Marketing Manager role gets access to Salesforce with reporting permission, HubSpot, and Google Analytics". Simple, scalable, auditable

But traditional RBAC breaks in complex environments. An employee is simultaneously project lead (requiring project management tool access), a cost center manager (requiring financial system access), and a department representative (requiring confidential shared drive access). Defining 500+ roles to capture all combinations becomes unmaintainable.

Modern IGA platforms increasingly support attribute-based access control (ABAC): permissions vary based on user attributes (department, location, manager, tenure) and context (time of day, device type, access location).

Role Discovery and Mining

Many organizations cannot articulate their roles. Entitlements exist in applications but lack documented business meaning. Modern IGA platforms use machine learning to analyze existing access patterns, identify clusters of users with similar permissions, and propose roles.

Segregation of Duties (SoD) Enforcement

What SoD protects against

Segregation of duties prevents fraud by ensuring no single person can complete a transaction unilaterally. Classic example: in financial systems, one person requests a payment, a second person approves it, a third person executes it. One person cannot perform all three steps.

SoD violations occur when user permissions combine incompatibly:

• Someone who can create purchase orders AND approve purchase orders
• Someone who can create vendor records AND process vendor payments
• Someone who can modify financial data AND approve financial reports

SoD in IGA

IGA platforms maintain SoD policies and enforce them at provisioning time. When a user requests or is assigned access that violates SoD, the platform either prevents the assignment or escalates to compliance for exception approval with documented justification

Criticla technical capability: SoD extends beyond single applications. Toxic combinations span systems. IGA detects conflicts across disparate applications by analyzing the combined entitlements the user would have across all systems, not just within one.

Risk-based SoD: Advanced IGA platforms calculate SoD violation risk. Some combinations are high-risk (financial fraud), others are low-risk (operational impact). The platform prioritizes remediation of high-risk violations

Access Reviews and Certification

Why Access Reviews Matter

Organizations accumulate permissions over time. An employee joins Finance, gets appropriate access, receives a promotion to Accounting, gains new permissions, moves to another role, adds more permissions. Two years later, they transfer to Operations but their previous permissions remain active. After three years in Operations, they have permissions from five prior roles, none of which align with their current job.

Without regular review, excessive permissions become endemic. Access reviews ask the simple question: "Is the person's access still apropriate for their current role?" Done manually across hundreds of applications for thousands of users, this becomes the compliance bottleneck that delays audits.

Modern Access Review Capabilities

Modern IGA platforms have reduced access review effort by 80%, a substantial achievement. How?

1. Automated low-risk approvals: The system classifies changes as low/medium/high risk based on sensitivity of the resource, access pattern history, and peer group analysis. Low-risk changes (a developer retaining access to development databases after a title change) auto-approve without human review
2. Smart Filtering: Instead of asking reviewers to attest 5000 access entries, the system highlights 200 changes that matter. New access, access to sensitive systems, access that violates policy or SoD
3. Evidence Bundling: The system provides contextual evidence, peer group comparison (what percentage of similar users have this access?), usage history (was this access actually used in the past 90 days?), access request records (who approved this and why?), helping reviewers make confident decisions faster
4. Pre-approvals from business logic: The system can pre-approve access that matches established policy. "Renewal of access to CRM for sales representatives" can auto-renew if the user hasn't changed roles and the access has been actively used.

Certification frequency: Modern compliance frameworks push toward quarterly or continuous certification rather than annual. IGA enables this through automation; manual processes could never support such frequency

Compliance Reporting and Audit Readiness

Audit Trail Completeness

IGA maintains comprehensive logs of every identity and access event: provisioning requests, approvals, entitlement changes, access reviews, attestations, exceptions. Every log entry includes who made the change, when, why (approval reason), and evidence supporting the deciison

This completeness transforms audits. Legacy environments require auditors to query multiple systems, often manually correlating data from HR systems, Active Directory, application logs, and spreadsheets. IGA provides a single audit trail covering the entire access governance story.

Compliance Report Automation

Regulatory frameworks require specific reports: "Show everyone who had access to customer payment information in the past 12 months". "Prove that access review occured quarterly". "Demonstrate segregation of duties is enforced".

IGA platforms embed templates for common compliance frameworks. Generating a GDPR compliance report becomes a button click rather than a multi-week manual compilation

AI and Advanced Analytics

Pattern Recognition and Risk Scoring

Modern IGA platforms employ machine learning to analyze access patterns. The system establishes baseline behavior: "Users in the sales department typically access Salesforce, HubSpot, and the product catalog repository". When an anomaly appears (a sales representative accessing the financial database or loggin in at 3AM from an unusual location), the system flags it for review

Behavioral analytics

Identify potential insider threats or compromised accounts. If an employee who has never used administrative access suddenly requests it, or accesses resources they never needed before, the system surfaces this for investigation

Automated Risk Remediation

Advanced platforms go beyond alerting to auto-remediation. High-risk entitlements (access that matches known fraud patterns or violates policy) can be automatically revoked with escalation to compliance for exception approval rather than requiring human pre-approval

Access Intelligence and Business Context* The distinction between modern and legacy IGA: modern system provide business intelligence, not just technical logging. They answer questions like:

• "What is the business justification for this person's database admin access?" (It was approved two years ago; the original justification is lost)
• "Who are the peers of this role?" (Context for access review decisions)
• "What percentage of employees in this department have access to this resource?" (Identifying outliers)

This business intelligence makes governance decisions faster and more defensible

Implementation Approach and Common Pitfalls

Why IGA Implementations fail

Understanding failure patterns is essential to position IGA correctly:

• Treating IGA as a Technology Project rather than a program: IGA projects frequenty stall 6-12 months post-implementation. The reason: they were designed as implementations (deploy technology, declare success, move on) rather than programs (continuous governance, ongoing optimization, multi-year transformation). Successful positioning: Frame IGA as a governance transformation program spanning 2-3 years with distinct phases and measurable governance outcomes each quarter, not a technology rollout measured in deployment milestones
• Insufficient Organizational Buy-In: IGA requires participations from people outside IT: HR (owns employee data), business unit leaders (define who needs what access), compliance (certifies appropriateness), data owners (manage sensitive information). Without coordinated buy-in, IGA becomes an IT-only project, fails to integrate critical data sources, and delivers limited value
• Over-Customization and Scope Creep: Organizations attempt to bend IGA platforms to fit exact existing processes rather than adopting process improvements that the platform enables. This leads to custom development, extend timelines (6-12 months delays common), high ongoing maintenance costs, and solutions that don't scale
• Poor Data Quality: IGA depends on quality input. If employee records are duplicated in HR, or if application entitlements are misconfigured, IGA propagates these errors at scale.
• Insufficient Application Prioritization: Organizations attempt to onboard all applications immediately. The result: 100's of application queues with 8+ year backlogs. Success requires ruthless prioritization: start with high-value applications (financial systems, sensitive data repositories, frequently audited systems), deliver governance for those, build organizational confidence, then expand.

Conclusion

Identity Governance and Administration has evolved from a "nice-to-have" compliance tool to a foundational security and operational necessity. The 15% market growth rate reflects this shift, not vendor hype but organizational realization that access governance is inseparable from breach prevention, audit compliance, and IT efficiency

The positioning opportunity is substantial. Organizations today operate in one of two states: either they have no systematic governance (high risk, manual processes, audit pain), or they have legacy IGA solutions deployed years ago (high cost, limited automation, inflexible). Both represent addressable markets

The path to success is framed around governance transformation, not technology deployment. Start with high-value applications and quick wins. Build organizational momentum through measurable early outcomes. Expand deliberately. Position IGA not as an IT cost center but as the foundational infrastructure enabling security, compliance and operational excellence. When positioned this way, as strategic enabling technology rather than another security tool, IGA attracts executive sponsorship, cross-organizational participation, and the multi-year commitment necessary for lasting transformation