In my new report “Entitlement & Access Governance”, published yesterday, I introduce a new term and abbreviation: EAG for Entitlement & Access Governance. Thanks to Dave Kearns for proposing that term – I like it because it reflects what this is about.

EAG describes approaches that some vendors currently call “Data Governance,” but enhanced and extended. It is about combining fine-grained entitlement management at the system level and the cross-system Identity Provisioning and Access Governance. We see an increasing number of vendors moving in that direction, closing the gap between Identity Provisioning and Access Governance on the one hand and the system-level, detailed management of entitlements on the other.

There always has been a predetermined breaking point between the Identity Provisioning layer (and the Access Governance layer on top of Provisioning) and the system-level entitlement management. While Identity Provisioning typically works on the level of, for instance, Active Directory global groups or SAP business roles, many systems (including Active Directory and SAP) have another system-specific hierarchical entitlement structure below that level. System administrators manage these. If a system administrator changes low-level entitlements - instance.g., the ACLs of a local group that is part of a global group - the Identity Provisioning system will not recognize that, at least not in most common deployments today. It will also become too complex to manage everything top-down, so there is a reason for system-level solutions.

EAG balances these requirements, by centralizing functions such as request and approval while leaving system-specific tasks local. I expect EAG to become the next big evolutionary step in core IAM, with some preliminary solutions already out there.