Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) projects have the reputation of requiring time and expense, which can make it challenging to get buy-in from stakeholders for these necessary initiatives. Personally, I hear this complaint from customers who have dedicated significant effort and money to implement and maintain outdated legacy IGA solutions, and then have to seek buy-in to deploy a modern IGA solution like Zilla (which will require much less effort to deploy and maintain!).
I wanted to share some of my insights on how to gain support and participation from across the enterprise for deploying a modern IGA solution like Zilla. Zilla is built for complex, hybrid, modern environments that legacy IGA struggles to support. Using Zilla can erase many of the challenges associated with legacy IGA. But before you can make the switch, you’ll need to secure buy-in and budget approvals from multiple stakeholders across the organization. Here are some tips for gaining the necessary support for a modern IGA project.
Identifying Stakeholders in the Decision-Making Process
Getting a consensus agreement isn’t always easy. To gain enterprise-wide buy-in for a modern IGA solution, first understand the top requirements and challenges of each department involved in the process. We’ve detailed some of them below. Use this knowledge of their priorities to build a strong proposal that aligns with each stakeholder’s priorities.
CIO and IT: Addressing Integration Challenges While Streamlining Work
Top Requirements: The IT department is under pressure to manage technical integration, streamline processes, and improve application management. They need a solution that simplifies compliance, security, and provisioning at scale.
Challenges: Outdated systems lead to a flood of IT request tickets and manual work, making the team feel like they can never get ahead. Labor-intensive processes (like spreadsheet-driven audit preparation activities) are the biggest cause of these slowdowns. Additionally, integrating legacy systems with multiple on-premises and cloud applications can lead to roadblocks due to technical integration issues. Worse than creating a backlog, integration challenges can lead to security issues down the road.
CISO and Security Team: Gain Visibility and Control
Top Requirements: Ensuring strong security standards across every part of the organization is the number one priority. Today, security teams are increasingly faced with exposure risks related to identities and user access. Security is therefore concerned with identities across the organization, including human and non-human accounts.
Challenges: Legacy systems fail to provide the necessary visibility and real-time monitoring capabilities needed to discover and remediate issues. The proliferation of non-human identities has become particularly challenging, making it harder to enforce a least privilege access policy. These challenges are amplified when organizations lack a centralized view.
Compliance Team: Simplifying Regulatory Compliance
Top Requirements: Compliance teams are charged with ensuring audit completeness and accuracy, but achieving this can be incredibly complex. They strive to be as accurate as possible with minimal effort.
Challenges: Access reviews are painful and require labor-intensive manual audits. There’s often a disconnect between the identity team and system owners, leading to incomplete or inaccurate compliance documentation. This not only increases the risk of non-compliance fines but also consumes valuable resources.
Operations: Aligning Business Goals and Improving Efficiency
Top Requirements: Aligning business goals with operational efficiency and ensuring the continuity of business operations are top priorities for COOs.
Challenges: Legacy IGA systems are disjointed and lead to operational inefficiencies. In addition, they often cause misalignment with business objectives. These inefficiencies can threaten business continuity, especially if public knowledge of failing audits emerges, which is particularly damaging for publicly traded companies.
App Owners and Line of Business Managers: Boosting Productivity
Top Requirements: These are the day-to-day managers who don’t have time for slowdowns. Their biggest goal is to ensure that their departmental needs are met promptly to maintain and improve productivity.
Challenges: Delays in accessing necessary resources due to outdated, manual processes can lead to significant reductions in productivity. These delays frustrate employees and hinder a department’s ability to meet their goals.
The Hero Moments of Effective IGA Across Departments
Implementing a modern IGA solution like Zilla Security gives every department in the organization hero moments that make everyone shine. These significant improvements make their work life easier and free up time for other important tasks.
- IT Department: Erase the backlogs by providing a single view of every user across all apps, whether on-premises or in the cloud. Zilla streamlines user role management, enables self-service access requests, and easily integrates with the application landscape. By reducing the manual workload, IT teams can focus on strategic initiatives that drive the business forward.
- Security Team: Gain visibility and control with continuous monitoring and proactive exposure detection. Zilla provides a comprehensive view across all identities and systems. Security teams can easily detect and remediate threats, such as orphaned accounts, under-managed service accounts, toxic combinations, and excessive permissions.
- Compliance Team: Make compliance more effortless. Zilla streamlines compliance processes by automating user access reviews and producing a robust evidence package.
- COO/Operations: Increase efficiency while maintaining business continuity. Zilla enhances operational efficiency by automating otherwise manual processes, ensuring identity governance supports the organization’s productivity.
- App Owners and Line of Business Managers: Review and approve access quickly. Zilla facilitates faster app access through automated, self-service processes, minimizing delays and giving critical time back to app and business owners.
How Zilla Security Delivers These Hero Moments
Zilla’s modern IGA platform is designed to meet the specific needs of each department, and many teams throughout the enterprise will see the benefits of adopting Zilla. Here’s how:
- Automation: Reduces manual workload and errors through streamlined, automated processes.
- Integration: Ensures seamless compatibility with all existing applications, both on-premises and in the cloud.
- Comprehensive Solution: Provides governance, administration, and security in a single, easy-to-use platform.
- User-Friendly Experience: Our platform integrates seamlessly with existing systems, offering an intuitive user experience that requires minimal deployment effort and very little training.
- Proven Impact: Delivers a compelling ROI, helping organizations demonstrate improved security posture and compliance quickly.
Get a demo to see how Zilla Security empowers your entire organization to work more efficiently and securely while staying aligned with strategic goals.
