Partner Content From the moment users log onto their machines, access rights shape their experience. Access rights determine which apps they can run, which directories they can open, and what information they can retrieve.
Yet despite their crucial role in IT administration, many organizations have no clear picture of their own access landscape. The main problem is scale. Admins have dozens of IT systems and hundreds of employees, contractors and guests to handle. They can’t manage the sheer number of privileges in a professional IT environment through manual governance processes like emails, checklists, and spreadsheets.
The resulting chaos leaves organizations in the dark, unable to match users’ current privileges against their intended level of access.
Those access needs evolve over time. Users get more privileges as they take on new roles and projects. They also no longer need some of their old access rights, but those are commonly overlooked. Those ghost privileges remain active far longer than intended, even past the point where their owner has left your organization. This gradual buildup of excess privileges is called privilege creep.
The dangers of unmanaged access
Admins often see outdated privileges and stale accounts as harmless IT clutter. In reality, they bloat your attack surface. Abandoned accounts are a popular entry point for attackers since there is no person on the other end to report suspicious activity. Once inside, they exploit those zombie accounts to quickly spread through your network and exfiltrate any data they have access to.
Danger lurks inside your organization as well. Without effective access control, your own staff could intentionally or accidentally expose sensitive information. A disgruntled employee might steal sales data before switching to a competitor. A careless team member might accidentally share cloud documents with the wrong person.
These risks are widespread and their potential business impact is enormous. In 2024, 90% of organizations reported facing at least one identity-based attack in the past year, while 83% faced at least one insider attack. Just one successful attack against your organization could lead to data breaches, ransomware incidents and total IT outages.
Regain control through automated governance
So how can organizations control access risks and keep IT privileges safe, appropriate, and up to date? The stakes are high. Conventional methods like manual on/offboarding are too error-prone and labor-intensive for any business with more than a handful of users.
To govern access at scale, organizations need help. Only automated identity governance and administration platforms can keep up with the ever shifting responsibilities of your users, allowing you to balance seamless and secure access. IGA gives you the toolset you need to keep user privileges in line with their current role, and the visibility to ensure access remains appropriate over time.
Key features that allow IGA to streamline governance processes include:
- Lifecycle management: IGA dynamically updates access based on user roles, providing each person with the exact privileges needed for their current position and enabling zero-touch on- and offboarding.
- Approval workflows: Customizable approval workflows allow you to delegate access decisions to stakeholders within departments, speeding up approvals and freeing up your help desk.
- Access reviews: Periodic reviews ensure privileges are revoked once they are no longer required. Data owners are prompted to review access to resources under their control, renewing or revoking access as needed.
- In-depth reporting: A clear breakdown of who has access to what, showing you access rights across all IT systems and unstructured data. This in-depth view provides the visibility needed to make confident decisions and identify problems before they lead to a breach.
The right IGA for your organization
Centralized identity governance and administration is the only way to stay ahead of modern threats and secure today’s increasingly complex environments. But don’t make the mistake of thinking of IGA as just another box to tick on your cybersecurity checklist. Aside from offering transparency and enhanced data security, IGA speeds up administration and clears your schedule for more important tasks.
There is one problem, however: Not every IGA solution is viable in every environment. Depending on the size and structure of your organization, different platforms will do better or worse at covering your specific needs.
The key to making IGA work is integration. That means setting up the connections and workflows which allow your IGA solution to act as the central hub for governing access across your entire IT. Although this is essential to any IGA project, how IGA solutions go about integrating with your environment looks quite different from product to product.
Legacy solutions prize endless customizability, which they achieve through a long and highly involved setup where integrations and workflows are scripted from the ground up. The amount of effort required to turn legacy IGA into an operational platform renders this approach incompatible with all but the largest and most well-resourced IT teams.
Meanwhile, modern IGA solutions like tenfold prioritize quick results through a streamlined setup and out-of-the-box integration. Apps can be connected in a matter of minutes through a simple, no-code UI. This user-friendly approach makes IGA accessible to organizations of all sizes, requiring less work and offering faster time to value.
From growing threats to regulatory pressure, the need for effective access control and centralized governance has never been higher. Even small to mid-sized orgs need IGA to keep their increasingly complex, cloud and SaaS-based environments under control. To help smaller organizations take their first steps towards automated governance, tenfold is offering a free tier of its IGA solution for orgs with up to 150 users. Learn more by visiting our website today.
Contributed by tenfold.