Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) is essential for managing access rights, securing sensitive data, and ensuring regulatory compliance. However, organizations frequently encounter significant roadblocks that undermine the effectiveness of their IGA implementations. Let’s delve into the primary challenges facing IGA today and how to address them with Hydden.
Major Issues in IGA Implementations
- No Standard for Data Collection
Extracting identity data from applications is a complex task due to the absence of a universal standard. Each application employs unique and often intricate data structures, necessitating custom development for application creation and onboarding into your IGA platform. This increases the effort, cost, and ongoing maintenance burden, as issues or updates to applications require continual adjustments.
- Data Format and Compatibility Issues
Each system and application uses their own proprietary formats for storing the data that your IGA solution requires, complicating the extraction and mapping of user attributes. These incompatibilities result in errors, incomplete data, and inconsistencies that jeopardize security and compliance initiatives.
- Reliance on Application Owners
Application owners, who typically lack expertise in security or identity management, are often tasked with providing critical technical details about their systems and apps. This disconnect creates communication gaps, delays, and inaccuracies, as they may not fully grasp the requirements of an IGA implementation.
- High Total Cost of Ownership
Maintaining and upgrading data collection of on-premise, custom, and legacy systems is slow, costly, and complex. The technical skill and resource-intensive nature of these activities limits scalability and places a financial burden on organizations.
Overcoming IGA Challenges
To tackle these issues, organizations need a forward-thinking solution that simplifies application onboarding, ensures data accuracy, and enhances adaptability. Here’s how Hydden can address these challenges:
- Rapid Application Onboarding
The cornerstone of modern IGA success is the ability to onboard applications quickly and seamlessly. Hydden automates application creation within existing IGA platforms, reducing onboarding time from weeks to hours—all without relying on expensive professional services. It guides users through the connection process and leverages a library of validated connectors developed by our in-house and customer community experts. We connect to apps using any standard protocol—such as LDAP, SCP, file, FTP, FTPS, SFTP, and Expect—automatically parsing responses and mapping schemas to a standardized format. Our approach will work seamlessly for 90% of enterprise applications, making onboarding proactive and frictionless.
- Collect from Any Application with a Universal Connector
Can’t use one of our built-in connector templates? Enter Hydden’s Universal Connector. Eliminate the complexity required to connect and collect the proper identity data from each application by utilizing our no-code solution that onboards any application—from legacy mainframes to custom SaaS apps—to the IGA system in hours, not weeks. It collects all account data and transforms it into a standardized format compatible with your broader identity tech stack. This unburdens your non-cybersecurity minded application owners, who often have difficulty configuring their applications correctly with your IGA solution. Unlike developer-focused alternatives requiring scripting, this no-code approach ensures you can finally work seamlessly with your application owners.
- Continuous Data Assurance
Accurate identity data is the backbone of effective IGA. The optimal solution provides continuous data validation and entitlement enrichment, automatically detecting significant changes so data collection errors can be resolved, mapping machine identities to human owners, and enriching account data in real time across all systems. By incorporating user behavior patterns and risk analysis, Hydden will proactively resolve account hygiene issues and add context to identity data. This ensures that access reviews and security decisions are based on reliable information, enhancing both compliance and operational efficiency.
- Identity Data Completeness and Freshness for Access Reviews
Access reviews are only as effective as the data they rely on. The ideal solution delivers real-time visibility into all identities—including user, machine, and local accounts—across every system. It proactively maps accounts, resolves hygiene issues, and eliminates the risks posed by stale data. This results in fast, accurate, and audit-ready access reviews, enabling organizations to maintain a strong security posture and meet compliance requirements with confidence.
Why a Data-First Approach is Essential
Successful IGA implementation rely on the quality of your identity data. When the data in your IGA solution is stale or inaccurate, your access reviews and governance workflows become unreliable, leading to unintentional exposure increases. Starting with dirty IGA data is as risky as depending on outdated spreadsheets.
By utilizing Hydden as a centralized, verified, and real-time identity data layer, you ensure that every governance decision is based on accurately collected information. Hydden eliminates the pitfalls of fragmented or outdated data, providing a single source of truth that powers effective IGA implementations.
Beyond just ticking boxes for compliance, IGA is about constantly reducing your identity attack surface. Hydden enables this by delivering accurate, real-time identity data that strengthens security and streamlines governance. Don’t let unreliable data undermine your IGA efforts. Adopt a data-first approach with Hydden and turn identity governance into a proactive shield against risk.
