Why Identity Governance (IGA) Remains a Challenge for Even Mature Organizations

Read full article from CyberArk here: https://www.cyberark.com/resources/all-blog-posts/think-iga-is-challenging-youre-not-alone/?utm_source=nhimg

Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) has long been viewed as a necessary but painful part of enterprise security. Despite years of investment in processes and tools, most organizations still face a familiar struggle: too many identities, too many applications, and not enough automation. If your IGA program feels slow, manual, and hard to scale, you’re not alone.

The identity security landscape is changing fast. Human identities such as employees and contractors are growing steadily—but machine identities, like service accounts, workloads, and APIs, are growing exponentially, now outnumbering humans by more than 80 to 1. Combined with SaaS sprawl and hybrid environments, this growth makes traditional governance methods—built for static, on-prem systems—obsolete.

Modern IGA is no longer about static compliance checklists. It’s about continuous visibility, automated governance, and adaptive control across both human and non-human identities. According to recent research by ESG, more than 77% of organizations consider IGA a core cybersecurity best practice, yet 67% still uncover excessive permissions during access reviews, and new employees wait nearly a week for complete access provisioning. These inefficiencies directly impact security posture, compliance readiness, and workforce productivity.

Why Traditional IGA Programs Struggle

Most legacy IGA tools fail for two reasons—integration friction and implementation fatigue.

• Integration friction: Many legacy systems can’t easily connect to modern SaaS platforms or hybrid environments. Only 15% of enterprises have integrated more than 80% of their apps, while 59% cite integration difficulty as a primary roadblock. Without complete visibility, automated governance breaks down.
• Slow, expensive deployments: Traditional IGA rollouts take months, require professional services, and often stall before full automation is achieved. 57% of organizations report high integration costs as the main barrier to success.

The result is a cycle of partial automation, manual spreadsheets, and governance fatigue. Nearly 87% of organizations still rely on manual reviews, tickets, and email approvals—an approach that drains resources and leaves blind spots for attackers to exploit.

The Shift to Modern IGA

Modern IGA redefines governance as a continuous, outcome-driven system—not a one-time implementation. It focuses on agility, integration, and automation across the entire identity estate. The key differentiators of a modern approach include:

• Faster time to value: Streamlined, out-of-the-box integrations using APIs and robotic process automation (RPA) eliminate multi-month integration cycles.
• End-to-end automation: Policy-driven workflows handle provisioning, deprovisioning, and access reviews automatically—reducing manual effort while improving accuracy.
• AI-powered decisions: Intelligent automation enables pre-approvals and least-privilege enforcement, cutting human workload by up to 61%.

These advancements turn IGA from a compliance obligation into a strategic enabler of business agility and security.

Moving Forward

Organizations can no longer rely on static governance models. To manage explosive identity growth and hybrid ecosystems, they must embrace AI-assisted automation, dynamic integrations, and continuous access visibility. Modern IGA platforms transform governance from a manual burden into a self-improving system that scales with the business.

By modernizing your IGA strategy, you can reduce operational strain, improve compliance readiness, and strengthen your enterprise’s overall identity security posture—turning governance from a source of friction into a source of acceleration.