Focus on Your Destination

By Kevin Cunningham President & Co-founder

In the last year, identity governance has become a strategic imperative for large, global enterprises. It plays a critical role in enabling organizations to inventory, analyze and understand the access privileges granted to their employees – and to be ready to answer the critical question: "Who has access to what?" This is especially important when addressing the issues of financial oversight, privacy concerns, identity protection, and the safeguarding of intellectual property.

However, while the needs for identity governance are on the rise worldwide, for many companies the question remains: "How, and when, do I put a solution into place?" The answer depends on what stage of evolution you have achieved with your existing identity management strategy and what you hope to accomplish with an identity governance solution.

You have choices in how you utilize identity governance to map to the business drivers of your enterprise. And, your starting point depends on a range of factors: the compliance issues you face, whether your primary drivers are to reduce the costs of achieving regulatory compliance, to improve overall IT security, to leverage the identity management systems you already have in place, etc. The reality is that needs are unique to every company.

Identify Your Priorities

As a first step, you should step back and assess your most urgent needs. You have to understand what you want to achieve in order to arrive at the appropriate approach/solution. Here are the most common goals that many companies consider high priorities with their identity governance implementations:

• Lower the cost of compliance;
• Eliminate audit deficiencies and improve audit performance;
• Streamline the access change and request management process across the organization;
• Ensure proper controls over sensitive or valuable data and applications;
• Effectively manage risk during a merger, acquisition, divestiture or layoff.

Which of these is causing you the most pain today?

Chart Your Course

Once you've evaluated your business drivers for identity governance, you'll be better positioned to prioritize your investments. If you're like most, you have more than one motivating factor, so the key is identifying your one or two most important business imperatives. Moving ahead without prioritizing may cause you to spend precious resources in the wrong direction, inhibiting your ability to meet your most critical needs in a timely manner.

The good news is that investing in an identity governance solution will enable you to realize some "quick wins," while at the same time strengthening your organization for the long-term.

Whatever path you choose to embark on first, you should avoid taking on every business problem on day one. Best results are achieved by taking a stepwise approach in which your project is focused on addressing the needs of your key business units, departments, or applications that align with your most pressing business goals – whether they are corporate agility, operational efficiency or regulatory compliance.

Set Sail

We recently published a Buyer's Guide for Identity Governance. It is designed to be a tool to help you work through the complex issues and questions that are key to building a successful identity governance strategy – from understanding business needs to prioritizing the steps for your implementation to evaluating solutions. We have built this Buyer's Guide through our extensive experience in working with many of the world's leading financial, healthcare, manufacturing, telecommunications, and retail enterprises. There are workbook sections included for you to build requests for proposals and conduct a side-by-side product analysis to arrive at the solution that is right for your organization. The guide's ultimate goal is to help you identify the best solution for your particular set of business challenges and technology requirements.

Download it today and get started on your journey to better identity governance.

Here's to a successful journey,

Kevin Cunningham
President & Co-founder
SailPoint