Most organizations running IGA today have dashboards, access reviews, quarterly certifications, and audit trails. What they don’t have is governance that reflects employment reality in real time.
Every CISO I have spoken with have found themselves in a kind of workplace situation where a termination happens on Monday, but the access review is scheduled for Friday, and somewhere in between a credential in Entra ID sits active for the whole week. The process is not broken, it is working exactly as designed and that is the real problem.
Most identity governance strategies claim to have IGA lifecycle automation, but none of them survive at scale. As per 2025 State of IGA Survey, only 6% of organizations have achieved full automation across their identity stack. Remaining are managing identity governance through a combination of manual tickets, periodic sync, and quarterly review cycles that are never current. This problem becomes huge when organizations are under continuous compliance pressure for SOX, HIPAA, GDPR, or NIS2.
For long, Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) has been positioned as the backbone of enterprise security and compliance. It promises transparency into employee access, ensures policies are enforced, and help organizations manage audits. But here is an uncomfortable truth.
IGA without lifecycle automation is just compliance theatre.
Identity Governance is only as accurate as the data behind it. But governance without execution is incomplete. If a user joins the organization and waits days for getting access or a role change does not trigger timely updates or a terminated employee retain access longer than he should, then no amount of access reviews can fix that in real time. What you are left with is a system that identifies issues after something happens, rather than preventing them.
In every enterprise, data originates in HR system. The HRIS is where the employee lifecycle information like promotion, transfer, FMLA, or termination updates first and then transfers to the Identity Directory. Yet, most IGA programs treat directory as authorized source of data.
With traditional IGA, you are not governing access. You are governing what your directory last knew about it. In the gap between these two systems, your real risk lives.
According to Varonis, more than 26% of user accounts in mid and large Enterprise organizations are inactive for 90 days or more but still enabled. This isn’t a negligence problem; it is a structural failure of governance which exists as HR is not directly wired into the identity engine.
For sure, Microsoft Entra ID has been advanced into a genuinely capable identity platform. For organizations that are already invested in Microsoft ecosystem, it covers a huge span of IGA requirements such as identity store, SSO, entitlement management, access reviews, conditional access, license management, and Privileged Identity Management. When paired with Purview and Microsoft Defender, it gets you close to a full security and governance posture.
But the real gap with Entra ID is it can only govern what already exists in its directory. It cannot automatically respond to what changes HR has decided about an employee’s lifecycle. Hence for IGA lifecycle automation, an event-driven integration layer like Hire2Retire is required that translate every HR event into an immediate identity action automatically without waiting for a manual ticket, a weekly batch run, or a periodic sync.
The problem is not with Entra ID platform but with traditional IGA structure. User provisioning is a technical operation. Decisions like whether a user should exist, what role should they hold, and what resources that are entitled for should be an HR decision. Governance means enforcing HR policy through identity infrastructure. Without this mechanism, governance becomes periodic v/s continuous.
IGA Lifecycle automations means that every HR event should automatically trigger an identity action.
This is exactly what Hire2Retire from RoboMQ is built to do. It acts as a bridge between HRIS and Identity Providers such as Entra ID, Active Directory, Okta, or Google Workspace, considering HR as a source of truth for real-time identity event trigger. Hire2Retire supports integration with 26+ HR Systems such as ADP, Workday, Paycor, and it enforces the JML cycle without requiring manual coordination between HR and IT.
What makes this approach better than standard directory sync is that Hire2Retire considers HR as the governing authority for identity events. HR attributes such as job codes, department, and employment type control role-based access assignment. When those attributes change, the identity profile is automatically updated.
As per IBM’s 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report, the average cost of a credential data breach can go upto $4.88 million with a mean detection and containment window of 290 days.
An audit tells you what your access looked like on the day someone checked it. It leaves you blinded for the access between review cycles, which is for most of every compliance period.
Security frameworks like NIS2, DORA, and updated SOX and HIPAA guidelines are all moving towards continuous, demonstrable governance rather than point-in-time snapshots. The question that CISOs should be asking is if they have real-time identity control not whether their program passes the next audit. Hire2Retire can help you close the loop between HR and identity.
Hire2Retire connects your HRIS and Identity, enabling real-time Identity Governance and Administration and automating the full JML lifecycle without manual intervention.
Somya Shrimal is a Marketing Specialist at RoboMQ. She is a tech enthusiast and a prolific blogger who helps businesses stay up-to-date with the latest trends and best practices in the industry. Her expertise in SaaS, cloud, on-premises apps, and IoT has made her a go-to source for businesses looking to navigate the ever-changing tech landscape.
Somya Shrimal is a Marketing Specialist at RoboMQ. She is a tech enthusiast and a prolific blogger who helps businesses stay up-to-date with the latest trends and best practices in the industry. Her expertise in SaaS, cloud, on-premises apps, and IoT has made her a go-to source for businesses looking to navigate the ever-changing tech landscape.
