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12/07/2026 12:17 pm
TL;DR: IAM enables authenticated access through controls like MFA, SSO, and passwordless, while IGA governs whether access is appropriate, certifiable, and compliant, according to RSA Security. That distinction matters because organisations that run IAM without IGA can accumulate privilege creep, weak audit evidence, and compliance gaps.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by RSA Security: Identity Governance & Administration (IGA) vs. Identity and Access Management (IAM): What’s the Difference?
By the numbers:
- Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts.
- 71% of NHIs are not rotated within recommended time frames, increasing the risk of compromise over time.
- 96% of organisations store secrets outside of secrets managers in vulnerable locations including code, config files, and CI/CD tools.
Questions worth separating out
Q: What breaks when IAM is used without IGA oversight?
A: IAM can provision and enforce access correctly while still leaving the enterprise unable to prove that access remains appropriate.
Q: Why do lifecycle changes matter so much in identity governance?
A: Because access is rarely static in real organisations.
Q: How should security teams govern non-human identities alongside human accounts?
A: Security teams should govern non-human identities as a separate lifecycle category with their own inventory, ownership, rotation, and offboarding controls.
Practitioner guidance
- Separate access enablement from entitlement governance Define IAM as the control set for authentication, federation, and session entry, then assign IGA to approvals, recertification, role validity, and audit evidence.
- Map lifecycle events to entitlement reviews Trigger access certification when users or service identities change role, purpose, ownership, or application dependency.
- Extend governance to non-human identities Include service accounts, API keys, tokens, and certificates in the same access review and offboarding model used for human users.
What's in the full article
RSA Security's full article covers the explanatory detail this post intentionally leaves at the framework level:
- Side-by-side capability breakdowns that distinguish authentication, access approval, certification, and auditing in practice
- Concrete examples of when IAM-only deployments create governance gaps in real identity programmes
- Operational scenarios for rolling out IAM and IGA together or adding IGA to an existing stack
- The article's own examples of success metrics for access provisioning, review completion, and audit findings
👉 Read RSA Security's explanation of the difference between IGA and IAM →
IGA vs IAM: where teams still blur governance and access?
Explore further
12/07/2026 12:30 pm
IAM and IGA are not competing categories. They are sequential controls, and confusing them creates false confidence. IAM answers whether an identity can prove itself and enter a system. IGA answers whether the resulting access is appropriate, reviewable, and defensible over time. The governance mistake is assuming that successful authentication equals acceptable entitlement. Practitioners should separate access enablement from access governance in programme design and reporting.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 91.6% of secrets remain valid five days after the targeted organisation is notified, showing a critical gap in remediation procedures, according to Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
- 96% of organisations store secrets outside of secrets managers in vulnerable locations including code, config files, and CI/CD tools, according to Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who is accountable when access is left active after a role change or departure?
A: Accountability should sit with the identity owner, the application owner, and the business approver chain that failed to remove or revalidate access. Governance frameworks such as NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 and internal access review processes assume responsibility is explicit. If it is not, risk persists after the person leaves.
👉 Read our full editorial: IGA and IAM are different controls in the identity stack
