RSA® Identity Governance and Lifecycle

Digital identity underpins modern business but has become a high-risk battleground, frequently exploited through compromised credentials and overly broad access rights. Many major breaches have involved leaked usernames and passwords, and excessive permissions can amplify damage—enabling intellectual property theft, privacy loss, fraud, revenue impacts, reputational harm, and sabotage. Identity Governance and Administration (IGA), as part of Identity and Access Management (IAM), addresses the lifecycle of accounts, attributes, and entitlements across on-premises and cloud environments. Core IGA capabilities include provisioning and de-provisioning, access governance policies (periodic re-authorization, managerial attestations, privileged access rules), segregation of duties (SoD) controls, and comprehensive reporting, auditing, and dashboards. Role and entitlement modeling and lifecycle management are also central, with Data Access Governance (DAG) highlighted as an important extension for controlling access to unstructured data in repositories like SharePoint and file servers.

RSA Identity Governance and Lifecycle is positioned as a configurable, enterprise-grade IGA offering, deployable on-premises, in the cloud, or via managed service. RSA Identity Governance focuses on access certifications, automated policy compliance monitoring, anomaly detection for potential entitlement abuse, and risk analytics that can prioritize remediation actions. RSA Identity Lifecycle provides request and approval workflows, policy-driven enforcement (including auto-rejection of prohibited requests and “break the glass” overrides), and broad connector-based integration for collecting and provisioning identities and entitlements across many directories and SaaS/IaaS systems. Reporting includes dashboards with drill-down visibility and standard reports spanning logins, orphaned accounts, violations, and risk/cost analyses. Add-ons include RSA Data Access Governance for unstructured data and RSA Business Role Manager for role discovery and modeling. Strengths include scalability, connectors, compliance support, and ecosystem integration; challenges include limited ETL depth, reliance on third-party privileged access tools, and risks of over-provisioning from entitlement suggestions.

• Compromised identity credentials remain a primary attack vector in many recent data breaches.
• Breaches at Yahoo, TalkTalk, Target, Sony, and the Prykarpattyaoblenergo Ukraine power station involved leaked or compromised usernames and passwords.
• Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) manages creation, maintenance, and deletion of accounts and attributes, plus entitlement assignment, across on-premises and cloud systems.
• Access governance commonly includes periodic re-authorization, managerial attestations for continued access, privileged access rules, and segregation of duties controls.
• RSA Security is headquartered in Bedford, Massachusetts, USA.
• EMC acquired RSA in 2006, and after Dell finalized its EMC acquisition in September 2016, RSA became a Dell subsidiary while maintaining its product lines.
• RSA Identity Governance and Lifecycle modules can be licensed separately or used together, with RSA Data Access Manager and RSA Business Role Manager as add-ons.
• RSA Identity Lifecycle supports “collector” synchronization and provisioning across numerous systems, including Active Directory, Office 365, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, and via SCIM.
• Integration with CyberArk is described as out-of-the-box and bi-directional for privileged account data collection and provisioning.
• Standard reporting includes items such as orphaned accounts, orphaned privileged accounts, violation reports, password changes, and Active Directory reports.

• “Digital identity is a cornerstone for enabling business.”
• “IGA also includes Access Governance capabilities, in particular the policies that apply to user accounts and the associated permissions.”
• “Managing and enforcing SoD (Segregation of Duties) controls is another main capability of such tools.”
• “What we see less, but consider as an important extension is Data Access Governance (DAG).”
• “RSA Identity Governance and Lifecycle is highly configurable.”
• “Access certification is a primary function of Identity Governance products.”
• “It is possible to enforce a variety of different types of business and regulatory policies, such as Sarbanes-Oxley and Segregation of Duties (SoD).”
• “These detection mechanisms and controls can be deployed as components of an insider threat program.”
• “The ability to override requests and processes can be configured for exceptional circumstances; these situations are usually called ‘break the glass’.”
• “Point-and-click wizards” are available to initiate connections to many directories, parallel provisioning systems, and the above-listed SaaS applications.