Zilla recently had the opportunity to discuss the evolution of identity governance with several experts on the topic – Deepak Taneja, our Zilla CEO, Paramita Chakraborty, IAM Practice Lead at GuidePoint Security, and Mark Jaffe, Zilla CMO and Chief Strategy Officer.
There were a few key things that stood out about the discussion that we wanted to highlight.
IGA is a Journey, and One Which has been Historically Characterized by Complexity
We are now in the third generation of IGA solutions. The evolution of IGA has been driven by the complexity of managing access across hundreds of SaaS applications, cloud platforms, and modern infrastructures. As cloud adoption has surged, so too has the number of access entitlements, creating an overwhelming governance challenge. IGA tools are difficult to integrate and adopt. The rollout of these tools can take years and can lead to stakeholder pushback, organizational friction, and extremely high costs.
This creates a dynamic where governance solutions are seen as bottlenecks that hold up the business rather than as enablers for achieving compliance and granting speedy, job-appropriate access. Modern IGA solves this problem and accelerates the business, as opposed to holding it back.
AI and Automation are Fundamental to a Successful IGA Strategy
Modern IGA is fundamentally built with the antidote to the chaos and complexity that characterized earlier governance solutions: Automation and AI.
With automation, organizations can drastically reduce human error and improve their time-to-value for governance tasks like user provisioning, access reviews, and compliance reporting. Automation also extends to the deployment and integration level (for example, Zilla’s platform integrates seamlessly with both legacy and cloud applications, offering out-of-the-box and automated solutions such as Zilla Universal Sync ), ensuring that the entire IGA deployment experience is automated.
AI offers an opportunity to ease the tedious and time-consuming tasks associated with role maintenance. AI provides an opportunity to automate the process of determining the right entitlements based on the existing user and application environment. At Zilla, we call these AI-driven entitlements “profiles.”
AI can reduce the workload on the teams managing compliance and provisioning, and on the supervisors and application owners executing these tasks.
Automation and AI will continue to be key factors in a modern identity governance strategy.
Non-Human Identities Remain a Challenge
One question brought up during the webinar begs further exploration, as it’s a common topic we hear about from customers: how to manage service accounts and non-human identities amidst all of this identity chaos?
Deepak helped break down the solution: the first step is always to find the human behind the non-human identity. Someone in the organization has knowledge of or needs this service account, and it’s important to make that correlation in the IGA system.
Thank you to Deepak, Paramita, and Mark for an insightful discussion – if you missed it, you can catch the recording, and if you’re interested in a demo, reach out to the team.
