What is Identity Governance?
When most people think about identity governance, the first thing that comes to mind is human identities; the protection of usernames, passwords, and the people within an organization. This aspect of identity is crucial to secure, but it’s not the only type of identity you need to be thinking about. Identity governance is the framework of policies and processes an organization maintains for the management and protection of all human identities and machine identities within an enterprise, along with authorized access to various resources and networks. Properly adhering to an identity framework has always been critical to ensure automated systems and devices are running as securely and efficiently as possible, but the rise of remote work and digital transformation has made it more important than ever.
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Critical Components of Identity Governance
Within the context of IT and security compliance, identity governance helps ensure that all human and machine identities within an organization are compliant with all regulatory and organization policies. By implementing rigorous identity governance practices and sticking to them, you can effectively manage user identities, control access to sensitive resources, mitigate security vulnerabilities and maintain audit and regulatory compliance.
Let’s discuss what the components of an effective identity governance framework are and why they are so important:
- Identity lifecycle management: From onboarding to offboarding, the entire lifecycle of user identities is covered in a proper identity governance framework. This includes provisioning, access requests, deprovisioning, and more. Not only will this ensure timely and seamless access for authorized parties, but also helps mitigate the risk of unauthorized parties gaining access.
- Resource privileges: As mentioned above, human and machine identities aren’t the only aspect of identity governance. It also encompasses managing access controls to all the resources within an IT infrastructure. This generally means defining user privilege levels from most to least privileged, and assigning a privilege level to each user and defining what sensitive materials each level of privilege can access. Similar to user access, resource privilege ensures that sensitive data is only accessible to parties that need it.
- Compliance management: GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS are just a small handful of regulatory requirements organizations need to maintain compliance with, and identity governance is essential to doing so. Identity governance best practices (discussed in detail below) allow organizations to demonstrate compliance with these requirements by enforcing strict access controls, audit trails, and clear documentation of all identity-related activities. Audits also become considerably easier with the visibility into user and resource permissions that are a natural result of proper identity governance.
- Risk management: : The mere fact that organizations handle the sensitive information around humans and machines is a risk, but there are ways to mitigate them. Identity governance policies inherently assist with managing all the risks that come with managing user identities and access rights. Regularly scheduled reviews of access privileges and in-depth risk assessments (ideally by a third-party) are all proactive steps to avoid security gaps and vulnerabilities.
Managing Machine Identities: A Special Focus
Since any good identity governance framework includes provisions for the security and management of all machines on a network, then machine identity management is clearly a foundational aspect to this framework. This means defining and adhering to policies, processes, and controls to manage and secure the identities of devices, automated systems, software agents, and applications within an organization's IT infrastructure.
Digital certificates, keys, and other credentials used by machines for authentication should all be considered in a machine identity management strategy. These machine identities enable automated workflows, machine-to-machine communication, and secure data exchange. In particular, automated workflows are less of a luxury and more of a necessity in enterprises that can have up to a million machine identities to manage.
So what role does identity governance play in machine identity management? Quite a few, actually! As discussed above, identity lifecycle management is a key component here, and includes certificate issuance, renewal, and revocation. It also facilitates visibility into usage frequency, location and behavior of machine identities on a network, and supports compliance efforts for regulations specific to machine identity management. In a world increasingly reliant upon interconnected systems across global and remote environments, securing machine identities for safe communication is the very bedrock of operational efficiency.
Best Practices for Successful Identity Governance
Now that you understand the critical role identity governance plays in your overall security strategy, let’s discuss implementation. Here are some actionable tips and best practices for successfully implementing and managing identity governance in your organization:
- Engage stakeholders: The first step to effectively establishing identity governance across your entire organization is to obtain buy-in from key stakeholders across IT, security, compliance, and even executive leadership departments. Getting their support from the start will ensure you begin the process with alignment on overall business and/or departmental goals.
- Establish clear policies and procedures: Now that you have the support you need, it’s time to start documenting! Don’t assume that anything is “common sense” or “common knowledge”. Take the time to clearly define the objectives and scope of your identity governance framework, including specific goals. These could include enhancing security, ensuring compliance, streamlining access management, or any number of things. Whatever this goal may be, create a solid roadmap of where you want your efforts to lead.
- Leverage automation: Your identity governance framework is doubtless going to include a massive amount of processes and requirements for every identity-type on your network. Even for a smaller organization, sticking to those policies for every single machine identity, every single time, is quickly going to prove impossible. Leveraging automation tools will allow you to reduce resources needed for management, minimize the likelihood of mistakes inherent to manual processes, and maintain enterprise-wide consistency in the implementation of your carefully-planned out policies.
- Adopt a risk-based approach: When creating your identity governance strategy, it’s best to prioritize access to sensitive data based on the level of risk associated with them. As far as who accesses what, adhere to a principle of least-privilege by granting users only the minimum level of rights needed to do their job. Start by identifying the highest-risk users and data, and work your way down. Where needed you can implement multi-factor authentication, or similar additional security protocols, to shore up the protection of the most privileged assets.
- Establish monitoring and audit processes: With this complex and widespread new framework in place, you’ll want to know that everything is running efficiently. By implementing monitoring tools you can track user activities, access requests, identity-related alerts, authorized access attempts, compliance violations, and so much more.
Overcoming Challenges in Identity Governance
Most of the time when organizations don’t have a clear identity governance in place, it’s due to facing one of several challenges blocking their efforts. Here are some of the most common challenges teams face around implementing identity governance:
- Complexity of IT environments: The larger the enterprise, the more complex the IT infrastructure is likely to be. Vast environments that may include a wide range of systems, applications and platforms are often difficult to govern, especially if legacy systems or cloud-based services are involved, but these are actually the ones that need a clear framework the most!
- Evolving threat landscape: Cybersecurity threats, from external threats and insider vulnerabilities, are always a concern. It may not be as difficult if the threats were constant, but the threat landscape changes everyday. This can make it difficult to define a single policy that will account for all potential and future risks. The only way to mitigate this is to stay up to date with the latest threats, and update your identity governance framework as needed.
- User resistance and adoption: Unfortunately, many users view the addition of security controls, such as multi-factor authentication or decreased permissions based on job function, as burdensome and disruptive. This resistance can hinder successful adoption of identity governance initiatives. The best way to combat this is to get proactive buy-in from stakeholders in your organization. They can assist with getting everybody on board and over the initial hump of implementation.
- Resource constraints: While the long-term gains of identity governance policies, particularly automation, are indisputable, the up-front costs (both time and money) can prove off-putting to some. Lack of funding and dedicated personnel to set up these policies may be a challenge, but laying out the many benefits that await at the end of the process can help mitigate this!
The Future of Identity Governance: Trends and Predictions
In the realm of identity management, we are living in a very exciting time! New trends such as AI and machine learning are changing the landscape as we know it, bringing up dynamic authentication and access management possibilities we’d never considered. For example, it may soon be possible to create smart algorithms that automate the user access management, including the adaptation of security measures and permissions based on user behavior and risk profiles.
In order to take advantage of these new advancements, you’ll want to get your base-level identity governance framework in place today! Not only is this necessary to secure and manage the human and machine identities on your network, the explosion of IoT has made it more important than ever. A clear set of guidelines and scalable solutions that handle a wide-range of connected devices is business critical, and there’s really no time to wait. To get started on your own identity governance framework, contact a Venafi expert to get a personalized risk assessment, and see how our products and solutions can bridge any security gaps you may have.