The Cyber Defense eMagazine February Edition for 2024

Legacy solutions hinder an organization’s ability to innovate and grow. On average, businesses spend
30% of their IT budgets on managing legacy solutions. While companies might be able to get by with the
drawbacks of outdated solutions for some functions, this isn’t something you want to risk when it comes
to security. Legacy solutions are forced to keep and maintain a sizable amount of bespoke code, which
makes upgrades expensive and therefore not done. With these solutions being harder to update,
implementing new features, bug patches and capabilities to support new business and regulatory
requirements becomes harder, therefore, customers suffer.
The original generation of IGA solutions relies on customized code, which is exceedingly challenging for
enterprises to maintain in their environments. It’s like trying to find someone to fix your CD player; they’re
hard to find these days. Implementations are cumbersome and require expert knowledge for basic tasks,
and every solution upgrade to newer versions comes with hard-to-determine risk, a timely project and
significant cost. However, after learning from the coding requirements of days gone by, today’s IGA now
offers a far more straightforward method of granting users varying levels of access.
When you extend an IGA solution by customization and coding, you need to be able to continuously
maintain it. Customizations made 10 to 15 years ago will require development skills in older programming
languages (e.g. Java, C++), as well as domain expertise on what that code actually does. This impacts
resourcing, since even if you still have the staff for it, they are likely working on other projects – and
maintaining code from 15 years ago is a major time sink for innovation and newer projects.
Shorter time to value
Initially, IGA was driven by compliance requirements, and while this is still a true need for deploying IGA,
the rising threats and attacks on identity are placing bigger expectations on IGA to help reduce the identity
attack surface.
Value can now be delivered in shorter time spans thanks to standard-based integrations and enriched
data flows with third-party components. The ability to implement deep and broad with a high pace has
significantly reduced the time-to-value for businesses, lowering costs along the way. It’s like exchanging
your wall of CDs for the option to access your music collection via a streaming service.
Exploring IGA trends
There are currently two contradicting trends in IGA: vendor consolidation versus best-of-breed. A
platform player may be a good choice for small and low-complexity companies. But with more regulations
and the explosion of identities and systems, more organizations are confronted with the limitations of
platforms that often provide good-enough or basic functionality, but are hard to extend.
A few things to consider when it comes to these trends are:
• Competition on connectivity: Platforms offer fewer choices in connectivity to other IAM solutions
(which they compete with). Because the modern enterprise cybersecurity landscape contains a
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