How Do I Justify Identity Governance to Management?

Are you an IT professional responsible for access management for your entire organization? Do you know you need an identity governance solution within your organization, but are having a hard time justifying it to upper management?  Here are five reasons Identity Governance will help your organization:

1. Process Standardization
2. Automation
3. Risk Management through Centralization
4. Compliance: Security, Reports, and Access Certification
5. User Experience

Process Standardization

Create new, standardized, and centrally located Identity Governance processes, including:

• Identity Lifecycle Management. Centralize, standardize, and streamline the end to end lifecycle of all individuals who have a relationship with your organization.
• Access Requests. Reduce the number of access request intake points to a single, standard entry point.
• Approval Workflow. Consistent, flexible, and auditable framework that allows your organization to designate various individuals, or groups of individuals, to approve or deny access requests based on what is being requested and the level of approval required.
• Automated or Manual Fulfillment of Security Access. Consistent method of ensuring identities have security access appropriately provisioned or de-provisioned following a variety of activities, whether automated or a manual workflow.
• Access Certification. Framework to review access granted to users and ensure that they do not have access that they are not authorized to have, and do not maintain access that they no longer need.
• Auditing & Compliance. Limits privileged access, or dangerous combinations (e.g. segregation of duties), to key systems to remain up to date with security compliance.

Automation

With an Identity Governance solution, your organization will have the capability to introduce automation of many common tasks covering several areas, including:

• Identity Lifecycle Management. Integration with one or more authoritative sources, such as an HR system, to automatically manage the attributes of an identity such as name, department, hire, and termination dates; these changes initiate in the authoritative source(s) and can automatically be passed to downstream systems as appropriate.
• Approval Workflow. Ensures that all security access requests are using a standard set of rules to determine what level of approval is required, and allows for auditing of who approved or denied access and when.
• Fulfillment of Security Access. Streamline and automate key target systems to handle all provisioning and deprovisioning activities, which eliminates manual processes, standardizes workflow, synchronizes target systems to ensure data integrity, and automatically follows the appropriate security access workflow process to emphasize compliance.
• Reconciliation with Target Systems. Automatically read your organization’s target system repositories to determine differences between what access really is, versus what the Identity Governance solution believes the access should be. This reduces risk concerning data discrepancies across your organization and is a typical process to control when administrators bypass standard Identity Governance processes and make changes directly in the target system.
• Access Certification. Utilize a standard platform to schedule access certifications to meet compliance requirements such as automatically triggering an access certification based off an Identity event, such as a job transfer or person conversion, or automatically triggering the deprovisioning workflow when access is revoked from an access certification, and more.
• Identity Audit Policies. Systematically manage policy violations, both preventive and detective, whereby a user has requested, or been assigned privileges that should not be held individually or in a combination of roles, attributes and/or entitlements.

Risk Management through Centralization

With an Identity Governance solution, you create a single source of truth for security access for anyone who has a relationship with your organization. Through this you can create a seamless environment to streamline identity information flow and maintenance workflow to reduce redundancies, manual effort, and data entry issues. Centralizing the identity access information within an Identity Governance solution ensures proper risk management with these key factors:

• Data Integrity Assurance. Eliminate multiple records for a single person, eliminate data inconsistencies across your organization, gain the ability to associate user accounts across systems to a single person, standardize processes to reduce the amount of variation in access channels and requests, reduce manual processes, reduce risk, and gain confidence in data accuracy because of integration with authoritative sources and workflow/automation to target systems.
• Reduce Manual Processes for Provisioning and Deprovisioning. By creating standard, centralized, automated processes for provisioning and deprovisioning, your organization will reduce the manual work required, eliminate human error, and modify security access in a more timely manner.
• Reduce Number of Existing Processes for Access Requests. Your organization will no longer need to manage multiple, disparate forms or email/walk up/phone call access requests.
• Enforce Appropriate Approval Workflow Processes. Ensures standard business rules are applied during the request process to determine the level of approval required before access is granted, and is designed to reduce risk so only individuals who require access are granted access.
• Reduce Manual Processes for Access Certification and Audits. Eliminate the manual collection and maintenance of data from targets systems to generate scheduled access reviews, eliminate the manual collection of decisions made on access reviews and the manual follow through on the decision (e.g. remove access not required), electronically track identity, request, approval and access history and provide an efficient means for review.

Compliance: Security, Reports, and Access Certification

With an Identity Governance solution, your organization can create an environment that ensures compliance and maintains a secure and up-to-date access management system. System transparency comes from:

• Reporting & Auditing. Ensure appropriate users have access to security access related data as necessary or required for compliance.
• Identity Audit Policy Framework. Provides authorized users access to the history of all detected policy violations and actions taken.
• Access Certification Framework. Review access granted to users and ensure that they do not have access that they are not authorized to have, and do not maintain access that they no longer need.

User Experience

Implementing an Identity Governance solution resolves issues with having several user interfaces and processes to govern security access, and provides an increase in user experience for the end-users and administrators. The enhanced user experience is promoted in areas of the system including:

• User Interface. Provide end users with a single, user-friendly user interface with a standardized look at feel for all governance activities, including security access requests, approval workflow, fulfillment of security access, certification of security access, and auditing and reporting of security access.
• Access Requests. Streamline, centralize and standardize the end to end access request process and reduce the number of manual errors, allow users to submit their own access requests, through self-service capabilities, while still ensuring appropriate access is granted only after necessary approvals are obtained.
• Centralization. Centralization of security access across your organization allows end users and administrators to have a single system that users can leverage to understand attributes about a person, what that person has access to at any given point in time, who requested access, who approved or denied access, who fulfilled access, and more.

Contact Zirous today to discuss our Identity & Access Management Catalyst program which will help your organization understand how an Identity Governance solution can deliver specific benefits to your business.