The Future of Identity Governance

The increasing importance that Board of Directors and executive management place on security, rapid advances in technology, and the increasing dependence on cloud platforms are driving fundamental changes in how enterprises view data and identity governance.

The changes to data and identity governance can be broken down into three areas:

  • Increasing focus on identity-based risk
  • Need for automated response
  • Extension of the current governance framework

Focus on Identity-Based Risk

The increasingly hostile cyber threat landscape and the escalating financial cost and reputation damage of a breach has forced enterprises to manage the risk associated with identity environment. A centralized identity repository that incorporates the full range of identity information along with the use of analytics/artificial intelligence enables organizations to evaluate their identity-based risk profile. Organizations can leverage this information to evaluate the risk associated with a user access request, make manager recommendations to approve/disapprove an access certification, etc.

Need for Automated Response

The proliferation of identity related compliance requirements and the proliferation and complexity of the risk environment has overwhelmed compliance / audit professionals as well as line of business manager responsible for balancing business requirements with the overall risk profile.  Managers are no longer able to balance the requirements versus the risk if they have to manually evaluate each decision.  The identity governance framework must be able to separate high risk requests and events which require manual intervention and low risk requests and events and make an automated, policy-based decision that don’t require manual intervention

Extension of the Current Governance Framework

The rapid adoption of new technologies requires the identity governance framework to incorporate new applications into the framework.  Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Internet of Things (IoT), DevOps and Data Access Governance are examples where new technologies and threats are driving requirements to expand the scope of the identity governance framework.


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