Don’t Neglect Your Applications: The Increasing Importance of Application Access Governance

Three Reasons AAG Should Be Top of Mind 

I’m going to let you in on a little secret, while Saviynt is primarily known for The Identity Cloud, the first security solution we introduced was actually for application access governance (AAG). While The Identity Cloud and identity governance and administration (IGA) tend to get the glory, and AAG is seen as a “traditional” solution, its importance as a key piece of a robust identity security program continues to grow. 

Depending on what report you cite, enterprise organizations utilize anywhere between 600 - 1,000+ applications. Regardless, that’s a lot of applications that potentially thousands of users are requesting access to. Additionally, the vast majority of these applications are cloud-based, and as companies continue their digital transformation to the cloud, managing application access is becoming increasingly difficult. Here’s why. 

Three Reasons Application Access Governance is Increasingly Important  

First, organizations are no longer relying on a single vendor to provide critical applications. Cloud-based, best-of-breed applications are complimenting or even supplanting traditional solutions. Organizations rely on multiple providers for enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems but are also including more line of business applications within their security programs. With applications housed in multiple environments (multi-cloud, on-premises, hybrid), management of who has access to what, and for how long, becomes increasingly difficult. Support for all applications in this now disparate landscape is critical, especially as auditors expand their scope and begin to look at areas not tied to financial risk. 

Second, the seemingly astronomical increase in the number of identities needing access to critical systems and other data. Today’s businesses use more third-parties than in the past. Supply chain partners, outsourced HR management, contracted and temporary employees, etc. have increased the number of identities joining, moving and leaving an organization’s environment. And organizations have historically dealt only with human identities. However, non-human identities (app to app communications, AD, machine identities, etc.) are outpacing their human counterparts in terms of growth by up to 15X according to some estimates.  

Third, in the face of increasing and more sophisticated cyber attacks, securing access to critical applications and data is more important than ever before. Malicious threat actors are also becoming increasingly patient. They’re willing to spend time to open up pathways for more lateral movement, deeply embedding themselves within environments and causing more chaos. 

Many legacy systems are also coming to an end-of-life stage, leaving organizations scrambling to find new solutions for securing application access. As traditional application governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) solutions begin leaving the market, including Oracle and SAP, now is the perfect time to re-evaluate how to manage application access. Widely recognized by analysts as a leader in access governance, Saviynt’s access governance capabilities provide the ideal solution to meet today’s evolving application security landscape. 

Saviynt’s AAG Difference 

Saviynt unifies application security (ex: Oracle, SAP, Workday, Epic, Salesforce, etc.) models under a single umbrella and aggregates information from any application to standardize control requirements throughout an organization. Doing so greatly simplifies program management and makes it easier to spot and remediate anomalous activities. The end result is a solution that helps you maintain continuous compliance while building confidence with internal and external auditors.  

Saviynt’s Application Access Governance Capabilities deliver:

• Cross-application risk visibility and management 
• Auditable time-bound emergency access management 
• Actual vs. potential violation validation and remediation 
• Identification of false positives 
• and much more
  

Other GRC solutions cannot, or can only, identify segregation of duties (SoD) violations in a single application. After that, it’s up to administrators to pull dissimilar data from different apps and manually review outputs to try and identify issues across applications. A time consuming and costly endeavor. Saviynt’s platform delivers the most granular entitlement governance of any other solution in the market. By unifying all security models, users have deep visibility across all types of SaaS and on-premises applications that allows organizations to easily prevent and identify SoD violations across all applications. 

Saviynt’s AAG capabilities extend traditional app GRC solutions. 

Using Saviynt helps organizations: 

• Unify security across all applications
• Continuously comply with relevant regulations and shorten audit timelines with robust reporting and cross-application SoD governance  
• Save costs associated with excessive licensing 
• Reduce enterprise risk and eliminate silos with a security program that adapts and grows with you
  

Recently, KuppingerCole, one of the industry’s leading consultancies, completed an executive review of Saviynt’s application access governance capabilities. The report provides an overview of today’s business application environment, reviews Saviynt’s Identity Cloud AAG capabilities, and discusses some of our unique capabilities. 

We also held a webinar with Martin Kuppinger, where we spoke about the changing landscape of AAG and how the sunsetting of SAP’s on-premises solutions is affecting organizations with a large SAP footprint. 

If you’d like to learn more about Saviynt’s AAG capabilities and how they are helping organizations solve the most complex access problems, I invite you to check out KuppingerCole’s executive review or visit our website.