One decade ago, identity management as a concept and solution set was the strongest available for “limited” security at most organizations. Since then, that Technology has become less desirable because of its single approach to handling tasks. The emergence of access Governance, on the other hand, is like the younger, much bigger brother of identity management. The technology is more robust and much more adept at helping you monitor who is touching, changing and even manipulating your data.

Access governance evolved from a series of single solutions that allowed for the assignment of employee access rights based on an employee’s role within an organization to technology that monitors employee access and privilege rights across an organization’s entire spectrum. In other words, governance technology is able to govern who has access to what systems and allows you to see who is doing what, where and when in your organization.

The reason for this is because your data is under attack. If you are like most, you have decided that you must move to a more holistic approach where rather than serving individual segments, the access governance software can protect every area of an organization. We are in a time where enhanced data security is a necessity and tighter controls of organizational operations.

Access governance technology shows a level of control of information as driven by organizational policy and procedure, providing your organization with a web of access, a blanket, if you will, that covers everyone’s rights in the organization according to their role. Should the role change or the individual leaves the organization, the access is immediately and automatically revoked — not always necessarily the case in identity management.

The rise in the importance of access governance solutions is because of increased emphasis on regulatory compliance, growing awareness of, and sensitivity to, the insider threat and a heightened concern for overall IT security. As you know, we need better insight into who is using our systems and resources, when, how and why.

Informational audits are a necessity and access governance means you can gain insight into compliance processes, automatically, with no manual oversight required. Because of such technology — which you are seeing rolled out across businesses of industry, educational entities, manufacturers, and healthcare organizations. Each of these sectors are taking more ownership of their own organizational security and where they had previously focused on passwords and basic rights management, they are now focused on proper access and data protection.

Access governance is the grown up version of identity and access management. Security is a central focus of the technology now, not just getting people into systems they “need” to do their jobs. The reasoning for this is simple: Operating a robust access governance policy allows organizations the ability to better monitor their environments to protect against evil activity, and report these findings in the event that you must do so.

In a nutshell, we’re witnessing a maturing of technology and security, and strengthening of cyber-security policies that help organizations, municipalities, schools and hospitals save billions of dollars, while providing seamless and secure experience to users. As we continue to move forward in this sector of the industry, we’ll continue to see organizations take an even more robust stance on completely integrated access governance systems.

Big times ahead for the industry and no small achievement for the gains we are making, but the decade ahead is likely to be filled with even more evolution ahead.