The importance of Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) in managing and reducing user access risk is well documented.
Yet, despite this, many organisations still rely at least partially on manual processes to submit, review and approve or deny access requests, whilst others have no automated way of certifying user access.
Although more and more organisations are starting to adopt Identity Lifecycle Management (ILM), processes are still largely inconsistent across many enterprises. Worse yet, some have no user-access or management processes in place at all. Whilst most organisations have an effective joiner process (even if manual), some organisations do not have effective leaver processes — and fewer still have mover processes. All this adds to the increased risk of an access violation.
When you consider how easy it is to automate IGA processes these days, this is highly surprising — and worrying given the growing number of cyber-attacks, many of which occur as the result of improper identity governance and user-access management.
How has IGA evolved?
Back in the early noughties, companies offering powerful suite solutions across the IAM spectrum — from access and lifecycle management to privileged access delegation — dominated the Identity and Access Management (IAM) market.
Historically, these solutions were often costly and difficult to deploy. As a result, the market responded with specialised solutions to tackle a specific IAM problem — be it identity governance, access management, privileged access or lifecycle management. Unlike previous products from suite vendors, these solutions offered deeper capabilities in that one problem space and were far less taxing to deploy.
Over time, it has become apparent that whilst there is a range of unique problems to solve within IAM, they are closely related and need advanced integration and interactions between them. This requires a software platform based on the core components of integration, process and decision logic — with an end-goal of making it faster to develop and deploy key business applications.
However, whilst many of the newer identity platforms technically meet these criteria, only the software vendors themselves are able to develop or deploy new business applications quickly. No company is going to create applications from these platforms; in fact, they likely already have their own application platform. As a result, many organisations are having to use multiple platforms, each competing with the other.
Modern, integrated solutions
Waiting around for decisions, responses and actions can have a detrimental impact on business productivity. Manual processes or systems that do not integrate and communicate with each other only make this problem worse.
Fortunately, these days, it is easy to automate these manual processes simply by wrapping workflows around them — which is precisely what ServiceNow enables.
ServiceNow Workflow helps companies achieve better business outcomes by automating the multi-step processes and activities that occur between any combination of people and systems. This is why Clear Skye built its IGA solution on the ServiceNow platform. Because it is integrated with ServiceNow and native IT Service Management (ITSM) controls, Clear Skye’s offering moves away from the traditional identity product integration problem. Instead, it creates something altogether more seamless which becomes part of core business processes.
Through this end-to-end automation approach, businesses can remove bottlenecks from workflows, enabling them to make their IGA processes more effective and efficient. These activities could include anything from generating records to notifying users of pending approvals. Whatever the interaction, automated workflows can simplify these previously manual or disconnected processes and help drive businesses forward.
At Burning Tree, we have helped many customers to integrate IGA solutions into their organisation. Clear Skye offers a different and compelling solution — one that allows us to deliver better value, faster. To find out more, please get in contact today.
