PAM and IGA Convergence By Design (Not Acquisition)

The drive towards convergence and consolidation in the Identity industry shows no signs of stopping. Customers are hungry for a unified approach to identifying, managing and securing identities across the enterprise. Many Identity vendors have responded to this trend over the past couple of years by merging, buying or being bought. PAM vendors are entering the identity space and IGA vendors acquiring PAM products. 

However, not all converged solutions are built the same. 

At Saviynt, we believe that a risk-based approach to privileged access management should weave together visibility, governance, and security within a single platform. Back in 2018-2019, when Saviynt was rising to a leadership position in the Identity Governance & Administration (IGA) market, we realized that legacy PAM tools were unable to fully secure today’s cloud ecosystems. 

From there we got to work building a true converged PAM and IGA experience – architecturally unified on a single code base to eliminate security silos, manage identity security within a single point of control. Using identity governance as the foundation for a PAM solution provides some uniquely valuable outcomes for our customers.

PAM Governance Requires IGA Integration

One of the primary weaknesses in basic PAM solutions is that they lack the granular control necessary to enforce least privilege by granting just enough access to perform the authorized privileged task. Governance was always an afterthought in PAM implementations. Traditional PAM use cases centered on privileged account discovery, vaulting, or checking credentials in and out. But governance needs to be embedded in PAM workflows to ensure that only the right people and systems are provided the right level of access. The only way to do this effectively and consistently is with a single IGA-PAM solution. 

Removing Privilege Requires IGA

Standalone PAM can help reduce privileged access, but that’s not going to help you with Zero Trust. Traditional PAM vaults protect access to “always-on” mega-privileged administrator accounts by centrally storing the credentials in a vault (or multiple vaults, in some cases) and obfuscating access by requiring users to check the credentials in and out, much like you would check out a library book. While this approach makes it a little more difficult to access these behemoth accounts, it does nothing to reduce an organization’s privilege footprint. Standing privilege is unacceptable in today’s complex and dynamic cloud reality. Instead, organizations should strive for a state of zero standing privilege (ZSP), where privileged access is provided only when needed for a legitimate purpose and only granted on a temporary basis for as long as it takes to complete the task. 

ZSP is enabled by a just-in-time (JIT) approach to privilege elevation and JIT PAM is driven by Identity. Today’s intelligent IGA tools provide a deep understanding of identities, organization roles, access rights, and usage to enforce appropriate, least-privilege access. Traditional PAM tools were not built with governance in mind, which makes them ill-equipped to provide fine-grained access decisions. 

There are several approaches to JIT PAM, but many of them fail to deliver a true ZSP solution. PAM and IGA integration can enable just-in-time privilege, but it’s not easy to integrate and maintain disparate vendor tools. This includes converged-in- name-only PAM and IGA from the same vendor. These platforms in name-only are difficult to configure, requiring heavy customization and additional coding or professional services to enable security and compliance goals. And this brings us to…

Scale, Productivity, and ROI, Made Possible by TRUE IGA-PAM Convergence 

PAM has never really been a standalone product. It always requires integration with an IGA system. Before the concept of convergence came into identity, organizations spent a lot of time integrating separate IGA and PAM products, training their users to learn two different solutions, and exhausting an enormous level of resources integrating and onboarding the same target systems to separate IGA and PAM systems.

Saviynt is the only PAM solution developed on the same underlying code base of an industry-leading IGA product. This means enterprises can ensure the entire lifecycle of privileged accounts in a single solution, including:

• Ownership and workflows for creation, updating, and decommissioning
• Enforcement of naming standards and controls to prevent sprawl of service accounts  
• Manage authorizations for check-out of credentials
• Prevent out-of-band creation of any service accounts
• Succession management
• Scheduled and risk-based access reviews

Saviynt Approach

Saviynt’s PAM solution is built on The Identity Cloud, Saviynt’s enterprise-ready converged identity platform, which converges IGA, granular application access, cloud security, and privileged access. Our identity-driven PAM approach means that customers can manage all identities and entitlements more efficiently to improve enterprise-wide visibility and leverage identity intelligence to make better access decisions.

To hear more from Saviynt experts about their experience in helping the world’s largest and most complex organizations modernize their identity programs and define what true PAM and IGA convergence looks like, we encourage you to check out our on-demand webinar.