Identity Governance and Administration (IGA)

What is Identity Governance and Administration?

Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) is a discipline within identity and access management (IAM) that unifies two core functions:

• Identity governance: Provides visibility into who has access to what, enforces policies, and ensures compliance with regulations.
• Identity administration: Handles operational tasks like creating, updating, and removing user accounts, and managing access requests.

IGA platforms help organizations balance security with efficiency by automating identity processes while maintaining strict governance.

Why is IGA important?

Identity Governance and Administration is essential for organizations managing thousands of users, applications, and devices. It reduces the risk of excessive or orphaned accounts, detects and prevents toxic role combinations, ensures compliance with GDPR, HIPAA, SOX, and other regulations, automates provisioning and deprovisioning to reduce manual errors, and supports Zero Trust by enforcing least privilege and continuous verification.

What are the key components of IGA?

• Provisioning and deprovisioning: Automating account creation and removal across systems.
• Access requests and approvals: Streamlining user access workflows with oversight.
• Access certification: Periodic reviews to ensure users have appropriate rights.
• Role-based access control (RBAC): Assigning permissions based on roles and responsibilities.
• Policy enforcement: Preventing segregation of duties (SoD) conflicts and enforcing compliance rules.
• Auditing and reporting: Providing visibility for security teams and auditors.

How does IGA work?

IGA integrates with directories, HR systems, and business applications to synchronize identities and enforce policies. When a new employee joins, it automatically provisions accounts and assigns role-based access. If a role changes, it adjusts permissions accordingly. When an employee leaves, it revokes all access to eliminate orphaned accounts. During periodic campaigns, managers certify or revoke access rights.

Use Cases

• Healthcare: Manages clinician access to patient data and applications while maintaining HIPAA compliance.
• Financial Services: Detects and prevents SoD conflicts in trading systems while automating access certifications.
• Government & Legal: Provides accountability with complete audit trails of identity changes and approvals
• Cloud & SaaS Providers: Automates provisioning across multi-tenant environments and applies governance to APIs and workloads.

How Netwrix can help

Netwrix supports Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) with solutions for Identity Management, Privileged Access Management (PAM), and Data Security Posture Management (DSPM). With Netwrix, organizations can:

• Automate identity lifecycle management across hybrid IT environments
• Run access certification campaigns to validate and enforce least privilege.
• Detect and remediate toxic role combinations and Segregation of Duties (SoD) conflicts.
• Provide auditors with detailed reports and compliance evidence.

This enables security teams to enforce governance effectively while reducing manual effort and complexity.

FAQs

Suggested Resources

• Your Guide to Identity Governance and Administration (IGA)
• Netwrix Identity Management