Identity Governance and Administration (IGA)
IGA is the discipline of continuously monitoring, reviewing, and certifying that access decisions are still valid and aligned with policy. It ensures identities and their permissions stay controlled and auditable throughout their lifecycle.
# WHAT TEAMS RUN INTO
- —
Access certifications become compliance theater. Managers get asked to certify access for hundreds of people they don't supervise, so they batch-approve everything without reading.
- —
No enforcement mechanism exists. A certification confirms excess access should be removed, but nothing automatically revokes it. The finding sits in a report and access persists.
- —
IGA visibility stops at direct access. Service accounts, inherited permissions, and transitive access across federated systems are invisible to standard IGA tools.
# WHY IT MATTERS
Governance without enforcement is a Potemkin village. IGA is meant to close the gap between what access should be and what access actually is. When IGA becomes a checkbox exercise, organizations get the illusion of control without the reality. Every identity decision is a security decision — governance exists to prove those decisions were made intentionally and are still valid.