Identity Governance and Administration (IGA)

Key takeaways

• Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) is a framework for managing digital identities and access.
• Purpose: Ensures the right individuals have the right access to technology resources.
• Core components:
  • Identity lifecycle management
  • Policy enforcement
  • Compliance reporting
• Primary benefits:
  • Strengthens an organization’s security posture
  • Minimizes security risks
  • Improves oversight and control
  • Supports distributed ownership of identity-related tasks across teams

What is IGA?

IGA is a subset of identity and access management (IAM), but is important enough that it’s often considered as a category of its own. It focuses on managing digital identities and regulating user access to sensitive data and systems. While IAM establishes access controls, IGA governs the policies, procedures, and lifecycle activities around those identities and entitlements.

In essence, IGA answers the questions:

• Who has access to what?
• Should they have that access?
• How is that access being used?

IGA tools and frameworks are essential in modern organizations to ensure consistent policy enforcement, manage risk, and maintain compliance with internal and external mandates.

How does IGA work?

IGA solutions provide a structured approach to identity lifecycle management and access governance. They are designed to manage user access across all systems, applications, and data environments whether on-premises, cloud-based, or hybrid.

Core features of IGA

• Identity Lifecycle Management: Automates the creation, modification, and deletion of user identities based on roles, departments, or employment status.
• Access Reviews and Certifications: Regularly evaluates whether users still require access to specific resources, helping enforce least-privilege policies.
• Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): Grants access based on predefined roles rather than individual permissions, simplifying access management at scale.
• Policy and Compliance Management: Ensures identity and access policies align with industry standards like SOX, HIPAA, or GDPR.
• Audit and Reporting: Maintains logs of access and identity events, offering transparency and helping with compliance reporting.
• Self-Service Access Requests: Enables users to request access with built-in approval workflows, reducing reliance on IT or development teams.
• Segregation of Duties (SoD): A fundamental IGA control that prevents any single user from holding conflicting access rights, such as provisioning and approving the same transaction, by enforcing checks and balances across roles and triggering automated SoD violation detection 

Why is IGA important?

Modern businesses are increasingly distributed and digital. Managing who has access to what is not only a technical challenge but also a risk management imperative. Without IGA, organizations face the danger of over-provisioned accounts, orphaned credentials, and policy drift.

Key drivers of IGA adoption

• Security Risks: Unmanaged access can expose critical systems to insider threats or external breaches.
• Compliance Requirements: Regulations demand strict controls over user access and comprehensive audit trails.
• Operational Efficiency: Automating identity processes saves time and reduces human error.

Stakeholder Accountability: IGA can enable non-developer stakeholders to manage access relevant to their role, reducing the load on engineering.

Benefits of IGA

Implementing IGA brings both strategic and operational advantages. It directly contributes to a healthier security posture and helps companies stay audit-ready.

Security and risk reduction

• Minimizes excessive privileges that could be exploited in a breach.
• Facilitates proactive identification of access anomalies.
• Ensures consistent enforcement of identity policies.

Compliance support

• Provides detailed audit logs and access reports.
• Aligns with global compliance frameworks.
• Reduces the cost and complexity of audits.

Operational gains

• Reduces developer toil by shifting identity responsibilities to appropriate stakeholders.
• Enables distributed ownership without compromising control.
• Improves user experience by reducing delays in access provisioning and deprovisioning.

Business agility

• Facilitates faster onboarding and offboarding.
• Supports organizational changes such as mergers or restructuring.
• Scales identity operations as the business grows.

Challenges of IGA

Despite its benefits, implementing IGA isn’t without hurdles. Organizations must address technical, organizational, and cultural challenges to succeed.

Implementation complexity

• Integrating IGA with existing systems can be technically demanding.
• Legacy infrastructure may not support modern identity protocols.

Change management

• Shifting responsibilities away from developers requires stakeholder buy-in.
• Policies and procedures must evolve to support distributed access governance.

Maintenance and scalability

• Ensuring IGA policies remain current with organizational changes is an ongoing effort.
• Scalability can be constrained without a modern, low-code identity platform.

IGA vs IAM: What’s the difference?

IGA and IAM are sometimes considered distinct components of a holistic identity strategy.

IGA builds on IAM foundations. IAM provides authenticates and provides access. IGA ensures that access is appropriate, necessary, and compliant.

Who uses IGA?

IGA isn’t the domain of a single team. It’s a shared framework that brings value across departments by enabling them to handle access-related responsibilities specific to their roles. When IGA is implemented well, it creates a balanced structure where responsibilities are distributed without sacrificing oversight or security.

• Developers: Developers are often the default owners of identity operations, but IGA helps shift that burden. By automating access provisioning and enabling self-service for routine identity tasks, IGA allows developers to offload day-to-day identity maintenance, avoid bottlenecks caused by access requests, and focus on building features and advancing the product roadmap. 
• Infosec: For Infosec teams, IGA is a control layer. It enables enforcement of policies across systems and provides visibility into who has access to what. 
• Product Teams: Product managers frequently need to control access to features, environments, or customer entitlements. IGA provides the tools to manage user roles, entitlements, and access levels without filing dev tickets.
• Customer Success: CS teams are often the first to hear from customers when access needs to be modified. With IGA, they can act without escalating every request.
• Compliance Officers: Compliance teams need traceability and control to meet regulatory mandates. IGA equips them with tools to ensure that access controls align with frameworks like SOC 2, HIPAA, or GDPR and schedule and manage access reviews and certifications. 

Where identity meets accountability

Identity Governance and Administration is essential for any organization managing access to sensitive systems and data. As teams scale and infrastructure diversifies, keeping access aligned with roles and responsibilities becomes increasingly complex. Without IGA, companies risk security gaps, operational delays, and non-compliance.

Frontegg simplifies this by shifting identity responsibilities away from overburdened development teams. Through an intuitive platform, stakeholders across security, product, and customer success can take charge of access management tasks relevant to their roles. This distribution not only improves efficiency but also strengthens security and compliance efforts.

With Frontegg, identity governance becomes a shared, streamlined process. Teams operate with greater autonomy, developers stay focused on innovation, and organizations maintain a strong, auditable control layer over identity and access.