The Essential Components of IAM, IGA and Identity Security Framework
Bassem Mohamed
EMEA Customer Success Engineer at SailPoint | CISSP | Identity Security & IAM SME
In a world where traditional perimeter defenses are fading, identity has become the new battlefield. With cloud adoption, remote work, and third-party integrations rising rapidly, cybercriminals now focus on exploiting weak identity controls. Over 80% of breaches involve stolen credentials or excessive access.
To stay ahead of today’s threats, organizations need to bring Identity and Access Management (IAM), Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) and a comprehensive Identity Security Framework together under one unified strategy.
This article might help in breaking down how these components work together to create a secure, compliant and resilient identity strategy.
Note: The term "access" in this article refers to enterprise applications, cloud infrastructure and unstructured data such as shared drives or documents
Identity and Access Management (IAM): The Operational Backbone
What is IAM?
IAM ensures the right people and entities have the right access at the right time, it is the first line of control over who can log in, what they can access and under what conditions.
Key Functions of IAM:
• Authentication: Verifying identity via passwords, biometrics or multi-factor authentication (MFA).
• Authorization: Granting access based on least privilege security principle (roles, policies and approved permissions).
• User Lifecycle Management: Automating onboarding, role changes and offboarding (Joiner, Mover & Leaver processes).
• Automated Workflows: Streamlining the business processes with the minimum human interaction.
Example:
A new hire at a financial firm needs access to email, HR systems and financial software. IAM automatically provisions the correct permissions based on their role. When they later move departments, their access updates instantly. When they leave, all accounts are deactivated eliminating "ghost" access risks.
Why IAM Matters?
Without IAM, organizations face manual errors, shadow access and compliance violations, such as ex-employees retaining access or users gaining permissions beyond their needs.
Identity Governance and Administration (IGA): The Oversight and Compliance Layer
What is IGA?
IGA ensures that access is appropriate, justified according to the least privilege principle. It bridges security policies with business accountability enabling organizations to meet regulatory demands and enforce internal controls.
Core Components of IGA:
• Visibility: Centralized view of who has access to what.
• Access Certification: Regular reviews to remove unnecessary or outdated permissions.
• Segregation of Duties (SoD): Detecting & Preventing conflicts of interest by ensuring no single user has excessive & risky access (e.g., payment approval + processing).
• Policy Enforcement: Automating policy checks during access requests to prevent violations.
• Compliance Reporting: Generating audit-ready reports to meet regulatory standards (e.g., GDPR, SOX, HIPAA).
Example:
A healthcare organization performs quarterly access reviews and discovers a physician still has access to records from a department they left two years ago triggering an immediate access revocation to prevent a HIPAA violation.
Why IGA Matters?
Without IGA, organizations risk toxic combinations of access, audit failures and undetected privilege creep where users accumulate excessive permissions over time.
Identity Security Framework: The Strategic Defense Layer
What is Identity Security?
Identity Security brings IAM and IGA together under a risk-based, near real-time security approach. It treats every identity as a potential threat including not only employees but also:
• Contractors, Third-party vendors and partners
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• Machine identities (e.g. service accounts, bots, scripts)
• Privileged accounts (e.g. admins, root users, DevOps pipelines)
Key Components of Identity Security:
• Machine identities Management: Extend the visibility, governance and control for all machine accounts as human identities accounts.
• Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM): Extend Identity Security to Cloud Infrastructure, providing a deeper insights into enterprise cloud access with entitlement visualization of cloud resources.
• Native Change Detection (NCD): Flags the changes made directly by administrators or privileged users to an account/ a user on an end-point that were not processed as part of defined business process like a user suddenly gaining high-level finance access.
AI-Powered Analytics:
• Outlier Detection: Quickly discover and remediate risky identities with access in the organization that is significantly different than their peers like a marketing user accessing financial resources.
• Recommended Decisioning: AI suggests approve/deny actions during access reviews or access requests based on contextual risk.
• Predictive Insights: Identifies high-risk roles, accounts or departments that require closer governance or automation.
Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) + AI:
• AI-Driven Role Discovery: Recommends optimal role structures by analyzing access patterns.
• Role Maintenance: Detects and removes outdated or overly broad composite access.
Why It Matters?
Without Identity Security, organizations often miss machine account misuse, stale privileged credentials, or insider threats. AI-driven identity security shifts posture from reactive to proactive, helping prevent breaches before they occur.
Advanced Identity Security Framework
What is Advanced Identity Security?
It goes beyond basic access control to provide real-time protection, intelligent monitoring and adaptive enforcement across all user types including employees, contractors, third parties, and machine identities. It integrates deeply with enterprise systems to detect abnormal behavior, secure privileged accounts and continuously assess risk using Zero Trust principles.
Key Components of Identity Security:
• Identity Threat Detection & Response (ITDR): Monitors identity activity in real-time to detect and respond to threats such as brute-force login attempts, privilege escalation, lateral movement and anomalous access behaviors before they escalate into breaches.
• Privileged Access Management (PAM): Enforces strict controls around high-risk accounts by enabling just-in-time access, session monitoring, credential vaulting and privilege elevation policies to minimize the attack surface.
• Adaptive Access Policies: Automatically enforce stronger controls (e.g., step-up MFA) based on behavioral anomalies or elevated privileges.
• Zero Trust Principles: Based on the philosophy of “never trust, always verify,” Zero Trust ensures that every access request regardless of user or location is continuously evaluated based on identity, device posture, and contextual risk before granting access.
Why It Matters?
Without advanced identity security, organizations are exposed to evolving risks such as insider threats, compromised machine identities, and unchecked privilege escalation. These risks often go undetected until it’s too late. By adopting a modern identity security framework, organizations can shift from a reactive to a proactive security posture enforcing least privilege, detecting threats early, and building resilience against today’s identity-based attack vectors.
The Power of a Unified Approach
Identity is now the #1 attack vector in the cybersecurity world. To stay ahead of threats, organizations must treat identity not just as a tool for productivity but as a critical control point for security and governance.
Unifying IAM, IGA and Identity Security provides the visibility, control, and intelligence needed to detect threats early, enforce least privilege and remain compliant in an ever-changing digital landscape.
Combining IAM + IGA + Identity Security delivers:
Ready to Fortify Your Identity Strategy?
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If you'd like to get a quick snapshot of your identity security posture, try the SailPoint Identity Security Maturity Assessment. It’s a fast and insightful way to evaluate where your organization stands in its identity security journey and identify areas for improvement.