Best Identity Governance and Administration Platform 2021: How to Buy and What to Buy
Best IGA 2021: How to Buy and What to Buy
Finding the best and right IGA solution for your organization may be difficult – especially when there are tons of products and features to choose from. The best IGA solutions aren’t necessarily the most expensive ones you find. Which one has the best support for Identity Life Cycle and Role Management? Which one’s the best when it comes to Regulatory Compliance, Auditing, and Certification?
Take a look at Sennovate’s top picks from the top security vendors, to help you find the best IGA solution for your specific needs.
SailPoint IdentityIQ
-Best Overall IGA
SailPoint has been named as the Gartner Magic Quadrant IGA Leader for the 6th consecutive time! While that may be sufficient to describe SailPoint’s prominence in the IAM and IGA world, 4me recently announced a “new integration between its cloud-based IT Service Management (ITSM) solution and the Identity and Access Management (IAM) system of SailPoint.” AIT News Desk
SailPoint IdentityIQ is a top-grossing and top-class product perfectly suitable for mid-size to large enterprises. It provides provisioning, password management, access request/certification services to on-premise, cloud as well as mobile applications. It helps manage IAM and IGA services smoothly on the cloud. Most importantly, many customers on Gartner Peer Insights claim their Customer Support Representatives are the best among all.
Eager to get it? Check out the product!
Want to integrate it more quickly and at a lower cost? Check out Sennovate’s SailPoint Experts to find out how we can help you implement it better!
Saviynt Security Manager (SSM)
- Easy to use and upgrade
Saviynt, SailPoint’s arch-nemesis, achieved the highest score of all vendors evaluated in the 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for IGA. Saviynt’s strength comes as a result of its cloud-native, converged approach to enterprise identity.
Saviynt Security Manager is considered as the NxtGen IGA tool by many Industry experts and customers, as it closely competes with SailPoint IdentityIQ. It is very well suited for mid-size to large enterprises. Saviynt provides very robust capabilities in a platform that is much more user-friendly for both End-users and Identity Administrators than others. It provides a lot of OOTB capabilities and requires less customization making it easier for upgrades and new integrations.
Finding it difficult to migrate your huge business? Try out Saviynt’s IGA solution and you’ll realize it’s a piece of cake!
Micro Focus NetIQ Identity Governance
- Best CIAM capabilities
“Micro Focus helps organizations strengthen their cyber resilience and protect their applications by eliminating vulnerabilities earlier in the development lifecycle. It’s one of the world’s largest enterprise software providers, delivering mission-critical technology to 40,000 customers around the globe.” PR Newswire
NetIQ Identity Governance is the optimal solution for any small to mid-size enterprise. It offers robust CIAM capabilities and scalability for the management and governance of B2C identities. The solution also offers real-time updates of identity data and adjusts changes in access as they occur. Thus, allowing organizations to achieve continuous compliance rather than only viewing governance statically. In fact, combining the benefits of both Micro Focus’ NetIQ Identity Governance and NetIQ Identity Manager would allow you to avail the complete package of both IAM and IGA.
Eager to get it? Check out the product!
Want to integrate it more quickly and at a lower cost? Check out Sennovate’s NetIQ Experts to find out how we can help you implement it better!
IBM Security Verify Governance
- Best Priced IGA
While we all know IBM is one of the leading innovators in Cloud, AI, and ML, IBM is also well known for its contributions towards tackling security challenges. IBM Security has over 7 unique products, each catering to solving a variety of security challenges ranging from IAM and IGA to SIEM and SOAR.
Security Verify Governance is also suitable for mid-size to large enterprises. It offers end-to-end user life cycle management, access certification, data governance with GDPR guidelines, Identity Analytics, and so much more. It certainly is your go-to solution for account provisioning and role reviews. Workflows are very flexible, allowing you to modify them to suit your specific business requirements.
Eager to get it? Check out the product!
What should you look for when buying an IGA Solution?
1. Identity Life Cycle
Identity Life Cycle management is the foundation of Identity Governance. It aims to completely automate and manage the digital identity lifecycle process. A digital identity is nothing but information about people, organizations, etc that are used by applications and other computing resources.
Identity Life Cycle management involves maintaining digital identities for people, their relationships with the organization, and their attributes during the entire process from creation to deletion, using identity life cycle patterns.
These life cycles cover Business-to-Employee(B2E), Business-to-Business(B2B), or Business-to-Consumer(B2C) use cases.
The 4 most common types of Identity Life Cycle patterns are:
- Authoritative source(B2E) – IGA tool is integrated with an external system that encapsulates life cycle processes, such as HR, vendor management, or student information systems
- Sponsorship and expiration(B2B) – This life cycle is used to cover non-employees that don’t fall under the HR life cycle such as, contractors or vendors
- Delegated administration(B2C) – At times, customers may have multiple business partners who may also require access to a particular application. In such cases, authorized personnel from each partner acts as the sponsor for the creation and maintenance of identity information for employees working with the organization.
- Self-registration(B2C) – This identity life cycle pattern is used for scenarios where there’s never a need to remove access such as an account created on an organization’s website.
2. Entitlement Management
Well, we can’t be without this, can we! 😉
It involves maintaining the link between identities and entitlements by keeping track of who has access to an entitlement, what type of access they have, and who is responsible for maintaining it. Entitlement management enables you to grant, modify, or revoke a user’s access to a resource.
A good entitlement management solution uses a centralized platform to manage licenses and assign entitlements to a software application. It not only ensures that the software is being used by the right people but also ensures that it’s being used at the right place and right time. Thus, ensuring that no user breaks the software license agreement.
3. Access Requests, Attestation Review, and Certification
- Providing users with a business and user-friendly interface for requesting entitlements
- Enabling managers to view and certify entitlements regularly to ensure compliance
4. Meeting Workflow Requirements
“IGA deployments often take much longer than anticipated and don’t achieve all of what the project is set out to do. Why? There are many factors, but the automation of workflow processes consistently come up as one of them.” says David Edwards, Senior Solutions Engineer at Okta.
At times, the workflow engine of the IGA solution doesn’t meet the requirements of the business workflow. Hence, it’s really important to ensure that the IGA tool you select has a compatible workflow engine.
There are 2 common types of workflow:
a) Operational(Internal) Workflow
Operational Workflow is a type of Internal Workflow that determines the functioning of the IGA product during the following use cases –
- An access request is approved
- Providing accesses to new users in bulk
- Reconciliation of accounts
b) Approval(External) Workflow
Approval Workflow focuses on presenting forms for data entry/review and driving the UI processes. These include approval for access requests, role changes, access certification, and other processes.
What Workflow Should You Strive For?
When looking for an IGA solution, approval workflows should be your top priority as they have the greatest impact on end-users. If a user finds it difficult to use a particular tool, he/she will figure out ways to bypass it and avoid using it.
“The goal should be to strive to adopt a single, simple workflow process for all access requests,” says David.
IGA projects should try adopting a standard (linear) approval workflow across all requests, rather than adopting unique ones for each application. We recommend a simple four-stage pattern for an ideal workflow:
- Policy Analysis
- Manager Approval
- Resource Approval
- Control Approval.
5. Automatic vs. Manual Fulfillment
It’s always a plus to go for automatic fulfillment over manual fulfillment as it saves your time and utilizes lesser resources. Automatic fulfillment or Provisioning utilizes predefined authorization policies, risk rules, and intelligence, while manual fulfillment uses a workflow or external authorization process validated and approved by respective owners, to complete the action.
6. Automated Auditing, Analytics, and Reporting
While assigning roles and access to users is important, it’s also a must to govern them and manage them properly.
Auditing allows you to examine and evaluate the current state of identities and entitlements against business rules and controls. With automated auditing, you will be notified automatically if any exceptions are found.
Analytics and reporting go hand-in-hand with auditing, as they act as tools for logging activities and generating compliance reports. They provide you with stats to identify risks and risk mitigation options to prevent any possible exposures.
Every product in the market is focused on catering to specific requirements of a business. Hence, understanding your specific business needs and choosing the right product that fits your business workflow is the key.