Why Identity Governance Should Be A Business Process Priority

Enterprise’s digital environments become more complex by the day. More customer and proprietary data find its way into enterprise databases. The expansion of the digital ecosystem causes a proportional expansion of possible attack vectors. Employee identities become increasingly precious as enterprises consider their digital transformation.

Managing those employees’ identities through identity governance should thus be a business process priority for all enterprises. Yet not enough businesses recognize the transformative power identity governance offers their workflows. They leave money on the table as long as this insight failure persists.  

Here’s why you should make identity governance a business process priority.

IGA Relieves the Pressure on Your IT Team    

IT teams can quickly become overwhelmed by the sheer scale of their identity tasks. They need to:

• Monitor all of your employee’s permissions.
• Provision and deprovision their credentials due to onboarding, offboarding, and role transitions.
• Handle temporary assignments via provisioning and deprovisioning.
• Analyze employee permissions to look for discrepancies.

No matter how talented your IT team, they remain only human. They can make critical mistakes or neglect what may appear a low-priority issue for far too long. Potential security issues can slip them by without a solution to assist them.

Don’t get us wrong—you still need human intelligence to make sure your IT environment remains secure. However, human intelligence alone is no longer enough. Making identity governance a business process priority allows you to take advantage of IGA’s automated workflows.

Automated workflows can streamline access requests, detect permission discrepancies, and handle temporary assignments to help your IT team prioritize other projects. With their time freed up, they can devote their attention to the true causes of concerns in your network.

IGA Monitors the Non-Employee Identities on Your Network

For years, enterprises confined their thinking around identity to their employees and privileged users.

Granted, that line of thinking remains far from outdated. However, it may no longer prove adequate. As enterprises scale their digital ecosystems, they incorporate third-party vendors and nonhuman identities such as applications into their business processes. Much like their human counterparts, these applications can have identity and permissions issues; these can cause disruptions to your business processes as they access databases they shouldn’t or insert themselves into network areas to which they don’t belong.   

Making identity governance a business process priority means exerting concrete control over your network. You can use it to monitor and regulate the behaviors of your enterprises’ nonhuman and third-party identities, ensuring they participate only in the necessary workflows.

Identity governance can segment and restrict, enforcing discipline when programs try to take advantage of every leniency. In this case, you can view identity governance not only as a cybersecurity measure but as a way to keep your workflows uncluttered.

Clutter is the enemy of productivity. Reducing it can only benefit your business. Speaking of which…

Identity Governance is a Productivity Enabler

How long does it take to provision an employee’s credentials? To deprovision it? To analyze, approve, or reject a temporary access request?

The same answer applies to all of these questions: longer than you wish. All of them waste not only your IT team’s time but the time of your employees awaiting the permissions necessary to do their jobs. Identity governance’s automation allows your business to streamline these processes, saving your employees’ crucial project time. The old adage “time is money” holds true.

Making identity governance a business process doesn’t have to be a radical proposition. It reaffirms your commitment to having the most competitive enterprise possible.      

Cybersecurity Should be A Business Process Priority

At least half of all data breaches involve access management issues; these issues can include lapses in provisioning, deprovisioning, or access exceeding users’ needs. Identity governance and administration solutions can prevent these issues from occurring.  

Why does preventing them matter? Not only will it prevent your enterprise facing hefty compliance issues, which can easily climb into the millions, but 68% of enterprises also lost customers as a result of a breach according to Forbes and SailPoint.

Simply put, a data breach results in long-term damage to your enterprise’s bottom line. Making identity governance, and cybersecurity in general, a business process priority keeps your bottom line intact.

The decision on whether to invest in cybersecurity seems much easier when you remember that.   

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