Identity Governance & Administration (IGA)

The Buyer’s Compass for Identity Governance & Administration (IGA) solutions is positioned as a structured starting point for vendor evaluation rather than a complete selection guide. It proposes a practical workflow: define primary use cases, weigh functional and non-functional criteria accordingly, collect and score vendor information, ask targeted follow-up questions, create a shortlist, and then proceed with deeper RFIs and proofs of concept—while ensuring technical and organizational prerequisites are in place.

IGA is defined as the convergence of Identity Lifecycle Management (ILM) and Access Governance (AG), with access intelligence acting as an analytics layer that supports business decision-making and governance improvements. The text highlights differing adoption patterns: some organizations only need ILM or only AG; others prefer full IGA suites, particularly for greenfield IAM implementations requiring both. A recurring theme is the importance of scoping requirements early because vendor strengths often skew toward either ILM-heavy or AG-heavy deployments. Another observed pattern is splitting responsibilities: ILM fulfillment can be outsourced to a managed service provider while governance stays internal to preserve control.

Core IGA functions span automated provisioning/deprovisioning, attribute and entitlement synchronization, role/entitlement management, static and event-driven policy enforcement, self-service access requests and password reset, reconciliation for compliance and segregation-of-duties (SoD), certifications, and auditing/reporting. Scalability is emphasized as deployments are stressed by growth in users, roles, targets, and connections, prompting vendors to re-architect for performance. The document focuses on on-premises deployable IGA (including managed service delivery) while urging attention to hybrid and modern architectures—microservices, containers, APIs, and “identity bridging”—to extend governance to cloud services and legacy on-prem environments.

• Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) combines Identity Lifecycle Management and Access Governance markets into an increasingly integrated category.
• Identity Lifecycle Management focuses on administering access fulfillment and entitlements across an identity lifecycle.
• Access Governance provides tools to manage workflows and entitlements, run reports, execute access certification campaigns, and perform segregation-of-duties checks.
• Access intelligence functions as an analytics layer over ILM and AG to provide business-related insights for decision-making and governance enhancement.
• One observed adoption pattern uses a managed service for ILM fulfillment while Access Governance is operated within the organization to retain control.
• IGA products support automated provisioning and de-provisioning of user accounts across nominated target systems.
• IGA capabilities include reconciliation of access against defined policies to support compliance and prevent SoD and other policy violations.
• The Buyer’s Compass is intended to guide evaluation of on-premises deployable IGA, including customer-site deployment or delivery as a managed service.
• SCIM support is preferred over SPML for federated and on-prem provisioning, while support for both may be evaluated depending on use case.
• Scalability evaluation should consider growth in users, identity attributes, roles, managed targets, and system connections.

• “This document is not a complete guideline for selecting vendors but should provide an excellent starting point to streamline the decision-making process.”
• “It is important that organizations scope their IGA requirements well before starting IGA product evaluations.”
• “Solutions may differ in the strength of IGA functionalities, making most of them better aligned for either Identity Lifecycle Management or Access Governance focused deployments.”
• “Access intelligence is the analytics layer over Identity Lifecycle Management and Access Governance that offers business-related insights to support effective decision making and potentially enhance governance.”
• “IGA deployments can quickly go under stress to perform better in process execution, target integration, and overall scalability.”
• “Some IGA vendors have re-architected their products to offer an identity bridging capability to integrate with cloud providers using industry specifications.”
• “Such approaches are suitable for organizations with a decent on-premises IT footprint and requirements to support complex IGA scenarios for legacy on-premises applications.”
• “The priority of these functional selection criteria should change based on the 4 IGA use-cases we have identified above.”
• “These criteria need to be adapted to your business and operational requirements.”
• “Some organizations struggle with these topics, not because of technical weaknesses and wrong products, but because of a lack of organizational maturity.”