Business Trends
Part Four: A New Paradigm in IAG: Is this Real-Time Access Governance?
Working in the tech industry, I’ve heard the term so many times now that for me it’s just a part of common language, but until this point I’ve not had cause to question just what it means. “Real time” to me means “instantly available” when considering availability of data or reports that should be used for business decisions. And having searched the term, it looks like I’m not far from generally-accepted definitions, where real time is associated with the computing time that a user senses as being almost immediate, allowing them to continue a work activity without delays waiting for information to be produced.
Sounds good, doesn’t it? But what if we could go even faster, so that there’s not even the infinitesimal delay between a business user needing information, and having that information at their fingertips?
Pre-Calculation Removes Any Delay in Access Insights
From a business user perspective, it’s natural that the basic expectation is to get the latest and current metrics when reviewing a status dashboard. For accurate business decisions to be made, users would definitely wish to always take measures and actions based on the latest real-time data.
When designing the event-based access analysis capability within SAP Cloud Identity Access Governance, we wanted to allow IT and compliance teams to get the most current snapshot possible of access analysis data, so that this would enable them to adjust user access for access optimization and compliance reasons.
How do we do this? Actually it’s rather simple. For every user access change or transaction registered, access analysis results are immediately calculated as a background activity. The user or administrator needs to do nothing— calculation just happens, in real time, without delay. The result is that the next time a user reviews a dashboard or report they simply have access to the latest access analysis results.
No process to run. No delay. The information is just there because it’s been pre-calculated. From a user perspective, real-real time is here!
Continuous Access Monitoring Is the New Benchmark
With access analysis results immediately available, at any time, the concept of continual access monitoring becomes a reality. By streamlining and simplifying the process of reviewing user access and analysis results, access administrators can ensure users get the access they need and can also eliminate unnecessary access that isn’t required, or has never been used and which could otherwise introduce compliance issues. This reduces the exceptions (access risk) and improves the management of access risks through mitigating and monitoring for potential fraud.
As a consequence, IT and compliance teams will find the time to focus on more important things. In-built analytics and risk scores (calculated based on user access, usage, risks and mitigation) will help guide IT and compliance teams to prioritize user access optimization based on the available metrics, which are of course immediately available to them.
Welcome to the modern day of work for IT and compliance teams with on-demand (real real-time) data delivered through user-oriented dashboards helping to support the prioritization of activities and decisions for many busy businesses.
For More on Identity and Access Governance (IAG)
Read the other blogs in the series:
Great post. I like the idea of real, real-time.