What is Identity Governance and Administration?

Controlling who accesses what across cloud apps is now business-critical for every enterprise.

Without centralized governance, inconsistent entitlements and scattered controls create security gaps that are costly to find and fix.

Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) bundles processes, policies and technology to enforce least privilege.

It speeds user lifecycle events like onboarding and offboarding, and produces audit-ready evidence across SaaS and on-prem systems, reducing risk and helping security and compliance.

Many IT and security teams feel overwhelmed by orphaned accounts, inconsistent entitlements and slow provisioning.

IGA sits above authentication and SSO, consuming IAM signals like logs and roles and driving remediation such as provisioning or revocation through policy.

Practical wins include faster onboarding, a smaller attack surface, and reliable evidence for auditors.

This article explains what IGA covers and how it differs from IAM.

I’ll cover core components that deliver lifecycle automation and certification, plus how centralized governance scales audit-ready least-privilege across large SaaS estates.

Table of Contents

• What is Identity Governance and Administration?
• How does IGA differ from IAM?
• What are IGA's core components?
• How does IGA support compliance and security?

What is Identity Governance and Administration?

Identity Governance and Administration sets the rules for who can access what, when, and why across your organization. Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) groups policies, processes, and tools so access decisions can be traced and repeated. Beyond a permissions map, it creates a single source of truth so teams stop guessing who should have which rights.

IGA’s main aim is enforcing least privilege while keeping operations efficient and auditable. That balance matters because stale or excessive access creates attack vectors, and auditors expect clear, tamper-evident records of authorization decisions. Practical outcomes that security and IT leaders commonly look for include:

• Faster onboarding and offboarding processes, reducing manual tickets and time-to-access changes,
• Smaller, measurable attack surface because excess entitlements are identified and removed,
• Consistent, exportable evidence that reliably supports compliance reviews and audits.

When IGA works, it changes how decisions are made and recorded across systems. Policies define acceptable access, the entitlement model standardizes role definitions, and every decision is logged so security and compliance teams can answer questions quickly. That traceability helps analysts investigate incidents faster and lowers friction between operational identity controls and governance teams. Gartner predicts most cloud security failures will remain the customer’s responsibility, so governance that covers dozens or hundreds of SaaS apps prevents simple misconfigurations from becoming major incidents.

Finally, IGA reduces uncertainty during audits and everyday operations by enforcing rules consistently and producing clear records. Teams stop relying on spreadsheets or undocumented practices, and instead get verifiable records of who approved what and when. This clarity lowers risk, speeds audits, and gives leadership confidence that access is aligned with policy rather than habit.

How does IGA differ from IAM?

IAM handles the day-to-day gates while IGA sets the rules and proves access decisions.

IAM focuses on operational controls that manage daily access and sessions across systems. It covers single sign-on, authentication, session enforcement, and password policies, while IGA provides the governance layer that defines who should have access, how often access is reviewed, and what evidence auditors need. IGA also looks outward across systems to create policy, certification workflows, and audit-ready records rather than just managing login flows.

They overlap because IGA depends on IAM signals and in turn instructs IAM to act when policy requires change. IGA consumes logs, roles, and entitlement data from auth platforms, and then it drives provisioning, deprovisioning, or role changes through those same platforms.

• IGA reads role assignments and authentication logs from providers like Okta and Microsoft Entra ID.
• It triggers account changes in HR-driven systems such as Workday or identity stores.
• It records attestations and builds evidence packages auditors can use during reviews.

After those inputs, IGA enforces policies at scale and documents decisions so security and compliance teams can trust the state of access.

Choose governance-driven remediation when you need traceability and stakeholder review, and pick immediate enforcement when risk requires instant action. For example, certification workflows are appropriate for recurring role cleanups where managers attest to access, while privileged session blocking should be handled immediately by the access control layer during a detected compromise. In practice, teams often pair an IGA product like SailPoint with IAM controls so revocation can happen automatically when policy flags an issue, shortening the time accounts remain exposed. IBM’s 2023 breach data shows detection often takes months, so linking governance to enforcement speeds response and gives audit-ready evidence for compliance reviews.

What are IGA’s core components?

Core IGA functions turn policy into repeatable, auditable actions across accounts and entitlements. They automate routine tasks, cutting the need for manual tickets and giving auditors reliable records. This moves policy off documents and into day-to-day account actions that show real results.

Automated provisioning links HR events to account creation and entitlement assignment in real time. Connecting Workday to an IGA engine lets a new hire automatically get accounts, group memberships, and SaaS roles without a ticket. De-provisioning uses the same signals to remove access quickly when people leave or move roles.

Access reviews and policy management reveal who has what and force choices about exceptions. Certifications gather owner attestations, escalate outliers, and create a clear approval trail auditors can replay months later. Typical access-review checks performed during those reviews include the following:

• Checks that role memberships are valid and that no users hold unexpected privilege levels across systems
• Detection of segregation-of-duty conflicts, plus verification that any compensating controls are documented and operating effectively as designed
• Identification of orphaned accounts and stale service credentials so teams can remove unused access and reduce risk
• Flagging unusual combinations of entitlements across applications that could create excessive access paths or hidden risks

Policy engines run pre-provisioning checks to block risky assignments and reduce the time excessive access exists.

Compliance reporting and dashboards convert raw logs into evidence packages auditors and control owners can use. Connectors pull role lists and access logs from systems like Azure AD, Okta, and Salesforce so the IGA system builds full entitlement inventories automatically. That lets teams report KPIs like time-to-provision, orphan account counts, and certification completion rates to support risk programs and operations metrics.

Practical integrations reduce errors, simplify reconciliation, and scale as the SaaS estate grows. When HR systems, directories, and applications feed IGA, teams spend less time reconciling data and more time on exceptions, tuning policies, and remediating real risks.

How does IGA support compliance and security?

Centralized IGA turns sprawling SaaS access into a single, audit-ready inventory across the company. It makes mapping entitlements to SOX, GDPR, HIPAA and PCI controls practical and packaging the exact evidence auditors request. Many companies feed an authoritative HR source like Workday into governance systems so employee status, job changes and terminations update automatically across hundreds of apps. That connection shortens audit cycles and removes guesswork during compliance exams.

When entitlement data is normalized, security teams can spot excessive access and prioritize removals before they become breach vectors. Continuous detection flags outliers, orphan accounts and privilege creep so teams act on risk instead of reacting to incidents. Connecting governance to a directory provider such as Okta also lets you tie authorization evidence directly to authentication logs, which auditors increasingly expect.

Scaling controls across a large SaaS portfolio requires automation and reliable connectors, not manual spreadsheets or ticket routing. Automation keeps pace with SaaS churn and lowers human error while API-driven evidence collection keeps verifiable provenance for each control. These practical building blocks help automate entitlement checks and package verifiable evidence across a diverse SaaS estate:

• API connectors that pull entitlement state from apps like Salesforce and other cloud services.
• Orchestration workflows that run re-certifications and deactivations without human tickets.
• Dashboards showing KPIs such as certification completion rates, orphan account counts, and average time-to-provision.
• Evidence bundles that package logs, approval trails and policy versions for auditors.

Centralized governance creates measurable improvements in both compliance posture and day-to-day operations. With clear inventories, mapped controls and automated evidence collection, audit prep becomes repeatable and security metrics feed risk programs, letting teams focus on the biggest exposures instead of chasing paperwork.

Conclusion

Identity governance helps teams control who can do what across many apps. It coordinates user privileges, policy checks, and audit trails so organizations can enforce consistent permissions across platforms and meet audit requirements.

It covers lifecycle tasks, policy checks, and audits; it explains how governance differs from day-to-day access controls and outlines core functions such as provisioning, access reviews, and reporting. That reduces manual work during reviews and shortens time to produce audit evidence.

Centralized IGA connects HR systems, directories and SaaS apps into inventories and workflows that reduce risk and collect evidence for audits. It enforces least privilege, speeds user lifecycles, and helps teams produce compliance records across SaaS.

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