With the rise of remote working, geographically distributed workforces, and the shift to the cloud, protecting identity and preventing fraud have never been more critical. Identity governance and administration (IGA) tools have been a key component of Identity Access Management (IAM) for many years, helping organizations manage user access and permissions. However, as the threat landscape evolves, the convergence of IGA tools with governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) is becoming increasingly necessary.  

So, what exactly is the convergence of IGA and GRC? IGA tools are being integrated with GRC solutions to provide a more comprehensive approach to managing identity and access. This integration allows organizations to manage user access and permissions, ensure compliance with regulations and policies, and mitigate risk.  

Traditionally IGA has focused on creating user accounts, automating the process of granting and revoking access rights, and managing the identity lifecycle as users move through the organization. Access rights are provisioned at the entitlement level, but there is no visibility into the specific fine-grain permissions that comprise the entitlement or the potential cross-application access risks that may arise during the provisioning process. While business software vendors provide out-of-the-box entitlements to make provisioning easier for IT departments, these entitlements often are beset with Separation of Duties (SOD) conflicts, which require additional analysis and consideration before provisioning. Additionally, entitlements that have been recently created or modified need ongoing analysis, a task that is frequently overlooked. 

To address this vulnerability and ensure regulatory compliance, GRC access control management solutions are designed to understand the roles, entitlements, policies, and risks of provisioning access to business applications down to the lowest securable permission, i.e., 'fine grain.' This deep security domain knowledge of business applications is critical to ensuring the right access is provisioned, at the right time, to the right data and functions, for application users. In other words, GRC access control management solutions provide the insight necessary to ensure that IGA provisioning complies with security and regulatory policy.  

CISOs, CIOs, and CFOs all have the goal of ensuring that the right users have access to the right resources at the right time to perform their job functions or tasks. They also want tools that automate a compliant provisioning process supporting controls that ensure access risks are quantified and removed or mitigated before granting access to resources. Furthermore, they would like this functionality to exist in one place, on one platform, with risk analytics and robust reporting.  

This convergence leads to IdentityGRC, which provides the perfect best-of-breed solution between identity governance and administration, with its traditional IT focus, and cross-application access control management, with its traditional GRC focus. IdentityGRC makes sense not only for IT and Finance departments from a solution consolidation and support perspective but also serves to collapse the silos that have existed too long around business applications, allowing both IT and Finance to focus on the processes and controls they own. It provides insight across the organization into business application risks, focusing on preventative controls to ensure that ALL identities have compliant access to the right resources at the right time to perform their intended job function or task. As businesses continue to grow and expand, staying ahead of the curve and adopting solutions that can help manage identity and access risks in a more preventative and automated way is essential.