Microsoft Entra ID Governance allows you to balance your organization's need for security and employee productivity with the right processes and visibility. It provides you with capabilities to ensure that the right people have the right access to the right resources. These and related Microsoft Entra ID and Enterprise Mobility + Security features allows you to mitigate access risk by protecting, monitoring, and auditing access to critical assets while ensuring employee and business partner productivity.

ID Governance gives organizations the ability to do the following tasks across employees, business partners and vendors, and across services and applications both on-premises and in clouds:

• Govern the identity lifecycle
• Govern access lifecycle
• Secure privileged access for administration

Specifically, it is intended to help organizations address these four key questions:

• Which users should have access to which resources?
• What are those users doing with that access?
• Are there effective organizational controls for managing access?
• Can auditors verify that the controls are working?

Identity Governance helps organizations achieve a balance between productivity - How quickly can a person have access to the resources they need, such as when they join my organization? And security - How should their access change over time, such as due to changes to that person's employment status? Identity lifecycle management is the foundation for Identity Governance, and effective governance at scale requires modernizing the identity lifecycle management infrastructure for applications.

For many organizations, identity lifecycle for employees is tied to the representation of that user in an HCM (human capital management) system. Microsoft Entra ID P1 or P2, through inbound provisioning, automatically maintains user identities for people represented in Workday and SuccessFactors in both Active Directory and Microsoft Entra ID, as described in the cloud HR application to Microsoft Entra user provisioning planning guide. Microsoft Entra ID P1 or P2 also includes Microsoft Identity Manager, which can import records from on-premises HCM systems such as SAP HCM, Oracle eBusiness, and Oracle PeopleSoft.

Increasingly, scenarios require collaboration with people outside your organization. Microsoft Entra B2B collaboration enables you to securely share your organization's applications and services with guest users and external partners from any organization, while maintaining control over your own corporate data. Microsoft Entra entitlement management enables you to select which organization's users are allowed to request access and be added as B2B guests to your organization's directory, and ensures that these guests are removed when they no longer need access.

Organizations are able to automate the identity lifecycle management process by using Lifecycle Workflows. Workflows can be created to automatically run tasks for a user before they enter the organization, as they change states during their time in the organization, and as they leave the organization. For example, a workflow can be configured to send an email with a temporary password to a new user's manager, or a welcome email to the user on their first day.

Organizations need a process to manage access beyond what was initially provisioned for a user when that user's identity was created. Furthermore, enterprise organizations need to be able to scale efficiently to be able to develop and enforce access policy and controls on an ongoing basis.

Typically, IT delegates access approval decisions to business decision makers. Furthermore, IT can involve the users themselves. For example, users that access confidential customer data in a company's marketing application in Europe need to know the company's policies. Guest users may be unaware of the handling requirements for data in an organization to which they've been invited.

Organizations can automate the access lifecycle process through technologies such as dynamic groups, coupled with user provisioning to SaaS apps or apps integrated with SCIM. Microsoft Entra ID can also provision access to apps that use AD groups, other on-premises directories or databases, or that have a SOAP or REST API including SAP. Organizations can also control which guest users have access to on-premises applications. These access rights can then be regularly reviewed using recurring Microsoft Entra access reviews. Microsoft Entra entitlement management also enables you to define how users request access across packages of group and team memberships, application roles, and SharePoint Online roles. For more information, see the simplifying identity governance tasks with automation section below to select the appropriate Microsoft Entra features for your access lifecycle automation scenarios.

Lifecycle access can be automated using workflows. Workflows can be created to automatically add user to groups, where access to applications and resources are granted. Users can also be moved when their condition within the organization changes to different groups, and can even be removed entirely from all groups.

When a user attempts to access applications, Microsoft Entra ID enforces Conditional Access policies. For example, Conditional Access policies can include displaying a terms of use and ensuring the user has agreed to those terms prior to being able to access an application. For more information, see govern access to applications in your environment.

Historically, privileged access has been described by other vendors as a separate capability from Identity Governance. However, at Microsoft, we think governing privileged access is a key part of Identity Governance especially given the potential for misuse associated with those administrator rights can cause to an organization. The employees, vendors, and contractors that take on administrative rights need to be governed.

Microsoft Entra Privileged Identity Management (PIM) provides additional controls tailored to securing access rights for resources, across Microsoft Entra, Azure, and other Microsoft Online Services. The just-in-time access, and role change alerting capabilities provided by Microsoft Entra PIM, in addition to multi-factor authentication and Conditional Access, provide a comprehensive set of governance controls to help secure your company's resources (directory, Microsoft 365, and Azure resource roles). As with other forms of access, organizations can use access reviews to configure recurring access re-certification for all users in administrator roles.

In addition to the features listed above, additional Microsoft Entra features frequently used to provide identity governance scenarios include:

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Check out the Getting started tab of Identity Governance in the Microsoft Entra admin center to start using entitlement management, access reviews, Privileged Identity Management, and Terms of use, and see some common use cases.

There are also tutorials for managing access to resources in entitlement management, onboarding external users to Microsoft Entra ID through an approval process, governing access to your applications and the application's existing users.

If you have any feedback about Identity Governance features, click Got feedback? in the Microsoft Entra admin center to submit your feedback. The team regularly reviews your feedback.

While there's no perfect solution or recommendation for every customer, the following configuration guides also provide the baseline policies Microsoft recommends you follow to ensure a more secure and productive workforce.

• Prerequisites for configuring Microsoft Entra ID for identity governance
• Plan an access reviews deployment to manage resource access lifecycle
• Identity and device access configurations
• Securing privileged access

You may also wish to engage with one of Microsoft's services and integration partners to plan your deployment or integrate with the applications and other systems in your environment.

Once you've started using these identity governance features, you can easily automate common identity governance scenarios. The following table shows how to get started for each scenario:

It's a best practice to use the least privileged role to perform administrative tasks in Identity Governance. We recommend that you use Microsoft Entra PIM to activate a role as needed to perform these tasks. The following are the least privileged directory roles to configure Identity Governance features:

• What is Microsoft Entra entitlement management?
• What are Microsoft Entra access reviews?
• What is Microsoft Entra Privileged Identity Management?
• What can I do with Terms of use?