1 Introduction
Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) often refers to the integrated Identity Lifecycle Management and Access Governance markets. Where Identity Lifecycle Management focuses on tasks related to administering access fulfillment and entitlements throughout an identity lifecycle, Access Governance provides the necessary tools for businesses to manage workflows and access entitlements, run reports, access certification campaigns, and SOD checks. IGA products also support the consolidation of identity information across multiple repositories and systems of record such as HR and ERP systems in an organization’s IT environment. The identity information, including user accounts, associated access entitlements, and other identity attributes, are collected from across the connected target systems for correlation and management of individual identities, user groups, and roles through a centralized administration console.
Access intelligence is the analytics layer over Identity Lifecycle Management and Access Governance that offers business-related insights to support effective decision making and enhance governance. Both Identity Lifecycle Management and Access Governance intelligence are becoming a sought-after capability for organizations requiring better visibility of identity administration and access entitlements across its IT infrastructure. Governance should move beyond simple reporting and dashboarding to offer more advanced capabilities that include machine learning techniques enabling pattern recognition to deliver valuable intelligence for process optimization, role design, automated reviews, and anomaly detection. The use of identity and access intelligence is one of the key differentiators between IGA vendors in the market today.
Automation of everyday IGA tasks has always been a priority for organizations to reduce the inaccuracy and administrative inefficiency encountered by manual completion of IGA tasks, making IGA operations leaner and achieve lower TCO. Most IGA tools provide support for automated provisioning and fulfillment, starting the basic automation of IGA requirements. Some organizations have more advanced requirements for automation, such as automated access reviews and event-driven access certifications. While some vendors have started to support these capabilities, IAM leaders should ensure the right mix of manual and automated IGA processes to ensure the effectiveness of processes is continuously monitored against defined key performance indicators (KPIs).
Depending on the size of an organization, the number of IT applications, systems, and other endpoints can range from a few to hundreds of target resources to onboard and provision. IGA tools should also be capable of handling legacy and modern target systems across many IT environments, such as on-premises, the cloud, multi-cloud, or even within a Docker container running in Kubernetes somewhere. The challenge is for the IGA solution to remain flexible and scalable enough to provide the IGA capabilities based on the customer's needs, whether the organization is big or small, or the IT environment is complex or straightforward.
To address enterprise these types of IGA requirements and challenges, Kapstone provides an Autonomous IGA solution that is modular, intelligent, and autonomous to make IGA simple and easy to use. Kapstone, founded in 2014 with offices in the US, Canada, and India, comes with over 25 years of IAM experience. Its technology partner ecosystem includes some leaders in the industry and continues to grow. Key customers of Kapstone are in the Insurance, Government, Energy, Finance, and Transportation industries.
