Identity Governance and Administration in a Digital World

Diana Volere

Diana Volere

Identity-Governance-and-Administration_2-700x473
When Thomas Friedman wrote his groundbreaking book The World Is Flat in 2005, he focused on the ways in which technology transformed global economies. The book proposed that new technologies were ushering in the third stage of globalization – one based on individuals competing, connecting, and collaborating in a new global economy. Since 2005, digital business models have continued to flatten the world, bringing with them the fourth Industrial Revolution. According to the World Economic Forum, Globalization 4.0’s Digital Economy and Society encompasses six main principles: good digital identities, data sharing, and permissions, access and adoption, securing people and processes, sustainable digital transformation, and informed, agile governance. As organizations embrace digital transformation to streamline business operations and create better customer experiences, managing identity and access must align with these principles. 

What Does “Good Digital Identity” Mean?

The World Economic Forum maps the concept of good digital identities to civic participation, banking and capital markets, financial and monetary systems, agile governance, and blockchain. Unfortunately, while these mappings show where good digital identities are necessary, they lack guidance about how to create them.  Creating good digital identities starts with the definition of the user. In a globalized, cloud-driven world, defining users increases in complexity. For example, definitions of users can be:
  • Employees
  • Customers
  • Vendors/Contractors
  • Internet of Things
  • Bots
  • APIs
  • Serverless
  • Server IDs
To align with the World Economic Forum’s definition of good digital identity, organizations need solutions that help them manage these diverse definitions. Before securing identities, you need to define them and create holistic access governance programs that prevent excess access and privilege misuse that lead to data breaches. 

How Identity Governance and Administration Strengthens Data Sharing and Permissions for the Digital Economy

Globally, regulatory bodies and industry standards organizations worry about the impact of digital transformation on people’s privacy rights. Stringent data privacy regulations such as the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) highlight the importance of establishing digital identity governance. Protecting privacy relies on ensuring that all user identities retain the right access to the right resources at the right time for the right reason.  Complex, interconnected cloud ecosystems often obfuscate visibility into data access, leaving information at risk. Users access a multitude of applications across the IT architecture that streamline their job functions. Unfortunately, the traditional application-level permissions create a variety of new risks in cloud ecosystems, including but not limited to segregation of duties (SOD) violations within ERP platforms and excess access to information that violates data-sharing regulations.  However, these risks only scratch the surface of data sharing and permissions problems. Across industries, organizations increasingly adopt the Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Critical infrastructure organizations, such as those in the oil and gas industry, connect IoT devices to their SCADA sensors. On the other end of the spectrum, healthcare organizations incorporate IoT devices to better monitor patients.  To comply with data sharing and permissions regulatory requirements, organizations need identity governance solutions that encompass all identities while also providing detailed entitlements. Equally important, they need a way to ensure that their access request, review, and certification process for provisioning access meets “least privilege necessary” requirements. Broad, application-level entitlements risk violating data sharing compliance requirements as identities can access all data within the application. Creating fine-grained entitlements that limit access not just to the application but within it promote enterprise cyber hygiene and protect consumers. 

Why Focusing on Access and Adoption Prevents Fraud and Strengthens Infrastructures

The Access and Adoption principle maps across a variety of technological, social, and geopolitical issues. At the enterprise level, Access and Adoption maps to fraud prevention by protecting business integrity and promoting security over digital communications and infrastructures. Cloud migration strategies increase data access and security risks. In complex cloud infrastructures, organizations often struggle to maintain compliance with SOD policies.  Ultimately, the lack of governance places the organization at risk for fraud. For example, providing the same employee access to both accounts receivable and accounts payable increases the potential for embezzlement. Multi-cloud infrastructures increase this risk since each cloud environment uses its own set of definitions and each application within a cloud environment adds another layer of user definitions, all of which require individual monitoring to prove identity governance.  As the enterprise scales, so scales its cloud, and each new access point creates a new risk. Access to these cloud infrastructures requires that organizations adopt equally scalable IGA solutions that enable the access management programs necessary to mitigate risk. 

How to Secure People and Processes to Create Sustainable Digital Transformation

The World Economic Forum’s definition of sustainable digital transformation incorporates innovation, entrepreneurship, and leadership in the fourth industrial revolution, all of which rely on organizations securing people and processes as part of their IT programs.  With privilege misuse considered a key data breach risk in the 2019 Data Breach Investigations Report, cybersecurity research supports the position that identity is the new perimeter. Securing data by securing people and processes requires organizations to embrace innovation so that they can become leaders in the new digital world.  Not all data incidents are large data breaches. A small data leakage, arising from excess access or employee privilege misuse such as snooping, leaves organizations at risk for compliance violations. Many compliance violations incorporate high fines. For example, the Portguese supervisory authority fined a Portguese hospital 150,000 euros for allowing “indiscriminate access to an excessive number of users.” Securing people, therefore, means creating a robust access governance program that incorporates limiting access to information and enforcing access policies.  Similarly, organizations need to secure automated identities. Whether IoT, Bots, APIs, serverless, or server IDs, non-human identities pose data and financial risks that must be addressed in order for digital transformation to remain a sustainable business model. If the risks arising from these new identities lead to economic losses, then digital transformation becomes untenable. 

Saviynt Provides Informed, Agile Identity Governance to Enable Globalization 4.0: #GovernanceForAll

The final Globalization 4.0 principle of Digital Economy and Society is informed agile governance. Within that principle, the World Economic Forum aggregates seven principles that define Saviynt and our approach to #GovernanceForAll. 

One Identity for Life

At Saviynt, our core IGA capability enables organizations to create a single identity for all business, customer, and employee identities. We recognize the global dependencies that drive the modern enterprise and create innovative solutions that enable organizations to prove governance over the people and processes that access information. 

Non-Digital Identity Management

With new types of identities organizations need to manage, we recognize that customers need new definitions to create a holistic identity governance program. Saviynt’s core IGA solutions and its new Cloud PAM solution that incorporates IGA capabilities provide continuous monitoring over both human and non-human identities to ensure that organizations establish and enforce “least privilege necessary” policies for all data and application access. 

Agile Identity Governance

Agile governance means managing technology while incorporating multi-stakeholder collaborations. Saviynt’s platform creates a single authoritative source for identity as well as a single source of audit documentation to enable organizations to manage their IGA programs in a single location across all internal stakeholders. 

Why Saviynt? Assured IGA and Cloud PAM Compliance-as-a-Service

Intelligent Identity. Smarter Security.

Saviynt starts with people and their access. Our innovative, cloud-native Gartner-recognized IGA solution enables full visibility into how and where users interact with data whether using a cloud, hybrid, or on-premises IT infrastructure.  Saviynt’s Identity Governance and Administration module employs access analytics that enable organizations to compare user access to peers to identify risk and streamline approvals, accelerating cloud migration. By comparing a user’s access to their peers, the enterprise has insight into whether the user access request is similar to others or distinctly different, thus spotlighting the risk of elevated access, maintaining “least privilege necessary” policies, and reducing Segregation of Duty (SOD) violations. With the Cloud Privileged Access Management (PAM) module, an enterprise can monitor privileged users to ensure that they do not abuse their rights while also providing time-bound escalations to mitigate potential access violations. Moreover, our cloud-native capabilities and integrations accelerate IT modernization by providing continuous monitoring and documentation burdens needed to prove continuous assurance over privileged access. We focus on addressing the customer’s entire governance landscape our single source of truth, increasing digital transformation’s economic value while reducing new vulnerability and risk.   For more information about our products, contact us today. 

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