What Is Identity Governance and Administration?
Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) is a workflow engine for managing the identity lifecycle at scale: provisioning access when someone joins or changes roles, running structured access-request and approval chains, and certifying that existing access is still appropriate on a recurring cadence. IGA platforms typically integrate with HR systems as the source of truth for who should have access to what, then automate the provisioning and deprovisioning that follows.
The most common IGA deliverable is the access certification campaign: a periodic review where managers or application owners confirm that each identity’s access is still needed, and revoke what isn’t. Done well, this closes the gap between what access someone has and what access they should have.
IGA governs the identities it has been onboarded to manage, typically through a connector to a directory, HR system, or application. An identity that was never provisioned through one of those paths, a local account, an unmanaged service account, an account created outside a standard workflow, generally isn’t in scope for IGA’s certification campaigns at all.