Entitlement management is foundational to identity governance. Yet for many organizations, it remains a source of confusion, manual work, and compliance risk.
At its core, it’s about understanding and controlling who has access to what, and for how long. But in today’s dynamic cloud environments, traditional approaches like manual entitlement reconciliation often create more drag than value.
Why it matters
Entitlements — permissions to access specific resources or perform certain actions — are the building blocks of access control. Without visibility into entitlements, organizations struggle to answer essential questions:
- Do users have the appropriate access?
- Are all entitlements reviewed regularly?
- Is there a clear owner for every permission set?
Legacy identity governance and administration (IGA) platforms tried solving this problem through entitlement discovery, cataloging, and reconciliation. They often relied on brittle connectors, intensive scripting, and periodic scans to match internal records with real-world access.
In theory, this should improve accuracy. In practice, it often leads to a fragmented view, increased operational overhead, and slow time to value.
Modern governance requires a new approach, one that embraces real-time integration, native entitlement awareness, and simplified governance workflows.
How Okta solves it
Through automated data discovery and deep integrations — including SCIM, LDAP, HR systems, and custom sources — Okta imports entitlements across a wide range of systems, both cloud and on-prem. These entitlements, such as roles, groups, and permissions, are then surfaced within Okta’s access governance workflows, including access requests, policies, and certification campaigns.
Admins can enrich these entitlements with descriptions, sensitivity labels, and ownership information to improve clarity and control. This metadata powers smarter policies and more effective reviews, allowing teams to govern access based on risk and business context — not just technical details.
Rather than relying heavily on periodic reconciliation jobs, Okta helps customers shift left. Proactively managing entitlements and governing access as it’s granted lets customers reduce the need for manual cleanup after the fact. In scenarios where Okta governs the full lifecycle of access — via provisioning, requests, and deprovisioning — it can serve as the most accurate reflection of what access should exist.
What makes this different
Unlike traditional IGA tools that rely on periodic scans and post-hoc reconciliation, Okta delivers a modern, integrated approach to entitlement management:
- Automated entitlement ingestion across cloud and on-prem systems, including SCIM, LDAP, HR systems, and APIs
- Centralized entitlement cataloging with enriched metadata — descriptions and ownership
- Entitlements embedded in governance workflows, enabling smarter access requests, certifications, and policy enforcement
- Reduced dependency on reconciliation jobs by proactively governing access at the time of assignment
This shift makes entitlement management more scalable, auditable, and aligned to today’s cloud-first IT environments. While reconciliation still has a role in some complex or legacy scenarios, many organizations find they can operate with significantly less reliance on traditional reconciliation when using Okta as the central control point.
Entitlement management shouldn’t be a post-facto scramble to catch up with what users already have. It should be an integrated, real-time process that ensures access is granted intentionally and governed continuously. With Okta, organizations can shift away from legacy cleanup and toward simplified, modern entitlement governance.
Already an Okta Identity Governance customer? See how to bring more apps and entitlement data into Okta in the Okta Identity Governance Product Hub.
New to Okta Identity Governance? Connect with one of our specialists to see how Okta Identity Governance can help you manage granular entitlements and unify access data across your environment.
