Post-Pandemic Enterprise Priorities: Start with Governance

It is time for organizations to recalibrate; the pandemic forced knee jerk reactions for many organizations as a matter of survival, but now is the time to assess building the right digital foundation. We believe this new foundation starts with governance as this was often times the most overlooked element of our pandemic lockdown. We define governance in the broadest possible terms to include identity, security and data governance. In this short blog we’ll focus on Identity Governance and Provisioning as these areas took a back seat over the past few years as this has exposed organizations to both increased risk and poor user experience. The analyst team at TechVision believes that the time is now for most large organizations to take a look at their governance foundation, lessons learned during the pandemic and better protect and manage their most critical assets. This will, in fact, be a central theme for our TechVision Chrysalis conference this November in San Diego.

So what is needed going forward?

We believe governance starts with more seamless integration, NOT silos. You can’t govern what you don’t know about, and Identity Governance & Administration (IGA) is only as good as the systems, services and platforms that are being covered and are known about. One area of focus is the tremendous overlap that often exists (and may have been extended during the pandemic lockdown) between IGA systems and Information Technology Service platforms (ITSM). Scalable, pragmatic IGA should, wherever possible, leverage ITSM as the center of both IT and IAM operations.

Scalable, pragmatic IGA should, wherever possible, leverage ITSM as the center of both IT and IAM operations.

This concept is what we refer to as "Pragmatic IGA"; leveraging the platforms, discovery, processes and services that are already part of your enterprise ecosystems (like ServiceNow) and use this as a foundation to clean up your IGA, provisioning and overall Identity Management program.

I often hear from clients that they want to do better. Leveraging your ITSM platform will save money, save time and mitigate risk for many organizations. For example, administrators and end users that are already using ServiceNow can use a single portal reducing the need for training. 

Leverage the platforms and processes that are already part of the enterprise

Clear Skye is a new entrant in the Identity Governance & Administration (IGA) space and is focused on this type of pragmatic IGA. Their solution simplifies the adoption of one of the most complex projects in IAM, by offering its IGA capabilities as a fully native ServiceNow application, instead of a standalone installation or service. This allows organizations to leverage existing workflows, interfaces, and infrastructure built on the ServiceNow platform and extend them to the IAM and IGA platforms. This eases integration, drives down administrative costs, but also limits the areas of transient inconsistency that hackers depend on.

Pragmatic IGA is a nice approach for both moving faster and improving security.