The 10 Questions That Actually Matter When Evaluating IGA Solutions

What Are Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) Solutions and Why Are They Important?

Identity governance and administration (IGA) solutions manage the lifecycle of user identities and their permissions across an entire organization, providing full coverage for on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments. With IGA, you can control who has access to which systems, enforce policies, and provide audit trails.

IGA is critical for security. Within an organization, the number of identities can easily reach into the thousands. Employees, contractors, partners, service accounts, and principals may have access to dozens or hundreds of applications. 

Without proper governance, overprivileged access can lead to breaches at scale. Attackers just need access to a single overprivileged account, and then they can move laterally until they hit the systems they’re interested in. (Read our article about the anatomy of an identity breach to learn more.)

How Do IGA Solutions Work?

At the core of IGA is identity lifecycle management (ILM), which is the end-to-end process of managing identities from creation and modification (for role changes) to deletion. User lifecycle management is a subset of ILM that focuses on human identities, but modern platforms extend lifecycle management to non-human identities as well.

One important note: Most IGA tools are not security tools; they’re IT administration tools built to address provisioning and lifecycle management problems. A security-first IGA solution like Linx Security evaluates every entitlement, making it easy to understand the potential damage it could cause.

What Are the 10 Questions to Ask When Evaluating IGA Solutions?

Asking targeted questions is the best way to determine whether the IGA tool you’re considering will strengthen your security posture. The right questions center on the common failure points for IGA solutions, not the checkbox features every vendor supports. 

Below, you’ll find a structured framework for the top 10 questions that truly matter. Each section includes context for why the question is important, real benchmarks for good and bad answers, and a discussion of how tools that fall short can lead to vulnerabilities.

1. How Easy Is It to Provision and Deprovision Accounts?

• Why Does This Matter?: In large organizations, accounts are provisioned and deprovisioned daily. Orphaned accounts (active accounts that no longer belong to anyone) are one of the most common entry points for attackers.
• Good Answer: Provisioning and deprovisioning are done automatically through your identity access and governance process. When a new person joins, their account is created with the appropriate access based on their role. Additional permissions can be requested through a self-service portal, which the security team evaluates. When somebody leaves the team, every account across all applications is disabled and removed the same day. Role changes trigger automatic access adjustments.
• Bad Answer: All provisioning and deprovisioning requests rely on manual tickets. IT teams add access for new users step by step, and when someone leaves, the spreadsheet gets updated.
  
  • Impact: Spreadsheet-based workflows can fall through the cracks. Six months after someone’s left, their orphaned account might still have broad access, which is an invitation to attack. 

2. What Is the API Coverage for the IGA Solution?

• Why Does This Matter?: The IGA solution you choose needs to integrate with your cloud providers, SaaS applications, HR platform, and ticketing systems.
• Good Answer: The IGA solution is API-first, with all functionality available via the API, including provisioning, deprovisioning, policy management, and even reporting. Implementing custom integrations shouldn’t be a tedious process; it should be easy out of the box.
• Bad Answer: The API is limited to read-only operations or offers only a fraction of what the UI can do. It’s possible to implement custom integrations, but it’s a complex process.
  
  • Impact: With limited API coverage, you can’t really implement automation. There will be delays and misconfigurations, which translate into access gaps that expand your blast radius.

3. What AI/ML Capabilities Does the Platform Have?

• Why Does This Matter?: Manual governance is unsustainable, and AI and ML capabilities can reduce the burden on reviewers and even surface risk.
• Good Answer: The IGA solution uses AI to analyze access patterns, detect anomalies, and make recommendations that reviewers can act on.
• Bad Answer: The IGA solution is “AI-powered,” but it only offers a basic rule engine with no feedback loop.
  
  • Impact: If your IGA solution can’t show you the blast radius of a compromised identity, it’s not actually using AI; it’s a buzzword.

4. What Expertise Is Needed to Get Value Out of the IGA Solution?

• Why Does This Matter?: If you need a large, dedicated team to manage the IGA solution, it will slow you down more than it helps.
• Good Answer: The platform is designed so that identity and security teams can operate it without being experts. 
• Bad Answer: You need certified consultants to manage your platform.
  
  • Impact: If operating the platform is too hard or expensive, nobody will update the rules, leading to vulnerabilities. For example, stale access policies can allow former employees to retain permissions they shouldn’t have.

5. Can the IGA Solution Model Complex Environment Relationships?

• Why Does This Matter?: In large enterprises, permissions aren’t flat. They involve nested groups, inherited roles, and service accounts that have chained permissions.
• Good Answer: The IGA solution uses a graph-native model to represent data relationships. An identity graph makes it easy to traverse complex access paths and understand dependencies.
• Bad Answer: The platform uses a relational database that stores access as row-level associations. You can understand that a user has a role, but there’s no context for why that role is dangerous.
  
  • Impact: Without a graph model, blast radius is a permanent blind spot.

6. What Is the Operational Overhead?

• Why Does This Matter?: If you need to pay 5–10 engineers just to manage day-to-day operations, you don’t have an IGA solution; you have IGA overhead.
• Good Answer: A small team of 1–3 engineers is enough to manage the IGA solution. Connectors are maintained by the vendor.
• Bad Answer: The IGA solution needs a dedicated team, and for each new application, you need to implement a manual connector configuration.
  
  • Impact: A team that spends more than half its time keeping the lights on is firefighting instead of focusing on implementing new features.

7. How Can You Deploy the IGA Platform (SaaS, On-Prem, Hybrid)?

• Why Does This Matter?: When you need speed, SaaS solutions are the best fit. Yet for highly regulated industries, on-prem is more suitable. An IGA solution must account for both. Depending on your compliance and speed requirements, you should be able to choose where you deploy your IGA platform.
• Good Answer: You have the flexibility to deploy the IGA platform wherever you want.
• Bad Answer: You can deploy the IGA tool in on-premises or SaaS environments, but there are critical differences between the solutions (e.g., the SaaS version has more features than the on-prem one because it relies on existing cloud services).
  
  • Impact: Without feature parity across deployment models, on-prem customers will receive a second-class experience. At the same time, if you start with SaaS and later want to migrate to on-prem, you’ll need to sacrifice some features in order to make the switch.

8. How Many of My Apps Have Production Connectors Today? 

• Why Does This Matter?: There’s a big difference between an app that’s “supported” (meaning you might need a dedicated team to integrate it) and a production-ready connector that’s available right now.
• Good Answer: The IGA solution has a transparent connector catalog that shows exactly which applications have production-ready connectors.
• Bad Answer: The IGA solution claims to have more than 100 built-in connectors, but for half of them, you need to implement custom solutions.
  
  • Impact: If your IGA solution can’t connect to an application, you can’t see the available access. These gaps dramatically increase your attack surface.

9. What Happens When a Review Decision Is Revoked?

• Why Does This Matter?: Every IGA solution can create tickets when access is revoked, but this is a risky default. Tickets pile up, and they can take several days to be implemented.
• Good Answer: When access is revoked, the IGA solution automatically executes the revocation through its connectors. Remediation is tracked, verified, and auditable. This is what a mature IGA solution looks like.
• Bad Answer: The IGA platform generates a ServiceNow ticket that goes into a queue, and someone implements it when they have time.
  
  • Impact: The time between a revocation decision and the actual implementation is pure risk exposure.

10. Can a Reviewer See Why Access Is Flagged Without Opening Another Tool?

• Why Does This Matter?: Toggling between several applications to analyze access is inefficient and overloads engineers.
• Good Answer: The IGA solution is graph-based, meaning the reviewer can understand why the access is flagged at a glance. They never need to leave the platform.
• Bad Answer: The reviewer needs to check several tools to understand why access has been flagged.
  
  • Impact: Friction can lead to a culture of rubber-stamped access permissions.

How Linx Revolutionizes IGA

Traditional IGA solutions were built for compliance, not security. Linx is different.

With Linx, you get an AI-native, security-first IGA solution. All of Linx’s features are purpose-built to give identity teams the visibility and context they need to reduce the blast radius of every identity in your organization.

Linx uses a graph-powered architecture to map every identity to every permission, resource, and relationship across your environments. It offers out-of-the-box automated remediation and a faster time to value with pre-built integrations and no-code connectors.

And with Linx Autopilot, teams can now deploy AI agents that work continuously on their behalf. Autopilot monitors identity environments 24/7, detects meaningful changes, evaluates risk in context, and takes action in real time.

Conclusion

Identity governance and administration solutions ensure that the right people have access to the right resources. Because a single over-privileged identity can become an entry point for a full-scale breach, the IGA solution you choose should be a security control that shows you exactly how large your blast radius is when an attack happens.

The 10 questions in this article help you separate IGA solutions that look good on paper from vendors that actually secure identities in practice. They empower you to make a choice that slashes risks and provides immediate value.

That’s where Linx stands apart.

If you’re ready to see what AI-native, graph-powered IGA looks like in practice, request a demo of Linx.