The last few years have seen the rise of many significant changes to the business landscape brought on by constant technology transformation, cloud acceleration, new cybersecurity threats, and more. As a fundamental component of enterprise security, identity governance and administration or IGA solutions in Singapore can aid with the challenges that come with these advancements. That said, using inflexible IGA software may worsen them instead.
With security leaders struggling to manage the risk associated with the rapid increase of identities in their organisation and growing identity bases, many seek to modernise their approach to IGA. By switching to a better IGA solution, businesses can more effectively regulate access to business and data transactions for both human and machine users. And most importantly, they can build a proper foundation for Zero-Trust security across their cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments.
As such, if you are considering changing your current IGA software, here are a few vital questions to ask to find the solution that offers the scalability, agility, and security benefits your organisation needs going forward.
1. How does the solution fit into your risk reduction strategy?
IGA is essential to risk reduction, seeing as identity is one of the go-to attack vectors for many hackers today. Therefore, managing a digital workforce across ecosystems requires a robust IGA platform.
Most businesses now have some form of Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) program that relies on a patchwork of technologies for their risk reduction initiatives, such as security information and event management (SIEM), multi-factor authentication (MFA), and so on.
These solutions, unfortunately, pale in comparison to modern IGA solutions, which are capable of deeper risk reduction since they provide more holistic security by extracting data from a wide range of other enterprise tools.
Many IGA platforms make such promises, but not all deliver on their claims of lowering risk profiles, improving decision-making, reducing compliance violations, and enforcing Zero-Trust. But once you find those who make good on their claims, they will be central to your organisation’s coordinated risk reduction and provide the framework for ensuring continuous security effectiveness.
2. What business needs should you consider during the IGA evaluation?
Modernising the organisation’s IGA will inherently crossover with the interests of various stakeholders. Therefore, it is vital to first understand the business’s needs prior to deciding on a solution. In general, such large transformation projects will affect users’ workflows, so anticipate experiencing disruptions in changing the current process. Once these are mapped, you can then create your “business case” or present how planned changes can free up employees to focus on more strategic work instead of time-consuming manual administration or help desk tasks.
Settling on the right solution will naturally bring significant efficiencies that lower the IGA platform’s total cost of ownership, improve stakeholders’ contributions, and bolster the organisation’s security posture. With that said, decide with the business in mind so you can deploy a platform that is well-suited to your exact needs.
3. Can the IGA solution be seamlessly scaled to meet your evolving business needs?
As you delve into the critical decision of selecting an IGA software for your business, consider the pivotal aspect of scalability. A robust IGA solution should offer seamless deployment options, whether on-premise or within a private cloud environment. How precisely does the chosen solution cater to your scalability requirements, especially in terms of its adept integration capabilities with legacy or custom-built systems within your organisation?
4. Does the platform deliver visibility across multiple environments?
Organisations need visibility into all of their users, resources and their access levels to those resources on-premises and in the cloud to properly support a Zero-Trust framework. This requires adopting a solution capable of simultaneously discovering, onboarding, and monitoring access to these resources with little to no manual intervention. Of course, creating a visibility strategy for multi-cloud or hybrid environments can be rather complex, especially when multiple cloud providers are involved.
Many organisations that use cloud technologies and operate in hybrid environments today typically employ separate teams to manage their different architectures. However, it is common for these teams to suffer from poor collaboration that negates their visibility. Security risks also increase when businesses employ manual discovery and management strategies to control and monitor user access across various environments. Introducing automation into this equation unlocks visibility into which users have network access as well as the details of their every interaction, such as their last accessed timestamp, when they changed their password, password expiry etc.
5. Does it support your required compliance frameworks?
Last but not least, a reliable IGA platform needs to support all the compliance frameworks that your organisation needs to meet and ensure adherence to all the relevant regulatory standards and data protection requirements.
Consider the intricate landscape of compliance within your organisation. Recognizing that multiple stakeholders, from HR to Finance, operate under distinct compliance frameworks, a reliable IGA platform becomes paramount. It must seamlessly align with the unique regulatory requirements of each department.
The spectrum of compliance extends beyond global standards like HIPAA, GDPR, SOX, and PCI DSS. In Singapore, for instance, the IGA solution should adeptly address local regulatory frameworks such as IM8, PDPA (Personal Data Protection Act), and HCSA (Health Care Services Act). This ensures a comprehensive approach to compliance, catering to the diverse needs of various departments within your organisation.
Conclusion
In the rapidly evolving landscape of digital transformation, the importance of IGA in digital transformation cannot be overstated. IGA solutions play a pivotal role in addressing the challenges posed by technological advancements, cloud acceleration, and emerging cybersecurity threats.
With remote and hybrid working now being pegged as the future of work, the work environment of today and tomorrow presents new challenges for governing and managing user access across organisations. Ensuring a secure and robust access management is therefore paramount to overseeing the new generation of workers. Implementing IGA identity governance in Singapore is the ideal strategy to achieve such a goal while providing flexibility and productivity.