How do you know if your identity governance strategy is working?
Too often, IGA success is measured by completion rather than impact. Access reviews were launched. Requests were processed. Audits passed. But none of those tell you whether identity risk has actually gone down, or whether your team is operating more efficiently than before.
That’s why we created this practical guide to measuring progress across the identity governance maturity curve.
As a companion to our Path to IGA Maturity guide, this guide outlines the success metrics that matter at each stage of maturity. These are the indicators that show whether your IGA program is reducing risk, eliminating toil, and scaling with the modern enterprise.
Why IGA metrics need to evolve
Early-stage IGA programs tend to track activity. Mature programs track outcomes.
At low maturity, teams ask:
- Did we complete the access review?
- Did we close the tickets?
- Did the auditor sign off?
At higher maturity, the questions change:
- How much access is actually justified?
- How quickly can we adapt to change?
- How much human effort is still required to stay secure?
The metrics below help bridge that gap.
1. Time to onboard and offboard users
What to track
- Average time to fully onboard a user
- Average time to fully offboard a user
- Time to remove all access after termination
**Why it matters
**Slow onboarding creates friction for the business. Slow offboarding creates massive risk. This metric is one of the clearest signals of whether identity processes are aligned with how your organization actually operates.
**Maturity signal
**As IGA matures, onboarding and offboarding move from manual, ticket-driven workflows to automated, policy-based execution triggered by authoritative sources like an HR platform.
2. Time to process access requests and revocations
What to track
- Mean time to approve or deny access requests
- Mean time to revoke access when no longer needed
**Why it matters
**Long request cycles lead to workarounds or lost productivity. Delayed revocation leaves unnecessary access in place. Both increase risk while frustrating employees.
**Maturity signal
**High-maturity teams rely less on human approvals and more on context-aware policies and automation, dramatically shrinking request and revocation times.
3. Automated vs. manual access tasks
What to track
- Percentage of access requests handled automatically
- Number of tickets required per access change
- Manual tasks per identity event
**Why it matters
**Manual work doesn’t scale, especially when NHIs and AI agents are exploding identity counts. Every ticket represents time spent by IT or security that could be avoided.
**Maturity signal
**As maturity increases, automation becomes the default. Manual intervention is reserved only for true exceptions, never routine access.
4. Standing privileged access vs. just-in-time access
What to track
- Percentage of privileged access that is standing
- Percentage moved to just-in-time (JIT)
- Duration of privileged access grants by system/application
**Why it matters
**Standing privilege is one of the highest-risk conditions in identity. Reducing it directly reduces your attack surface.
**Maturity signal
**Advanced IGA programs treat privilege as temporary by default, granting access only when needed and for a limited time.
5. Access review preparation time
What to track
- Time spent gathering access review data
- Time spent preparing access review campaigns
**Why it matters
**If reviews are painful to prepare, they happen less often or become checkbox exercises. Preparation time is a leading indicator of program sustainability.
**Maturity signal
**Mature programs rely on continuous data and automation, making campaign setup fast, repeatable, and low effort.
6. Access review completion and timeliness
What to track
- Time to complete access review campaigns
- On-time completion rate
- Percentage of overdue reviews
**Why it matters
**Late or incomplete reviews undermine both security and audit confidence. They also consume leadership attention.
**Maturity signal
**High-performing teams complete reviews faster, with higher confidence, and without constant chasing, with a system that automates the process all the way to completion.
7. Manual vs. automated access review decisions
What to track
- Percentage of review decisions made automatically
- Number of reviewer actions required per campaign
**Why it matters
**Human reviewers struggle with scale and context. Automation reduces fatigue while improving consistency.
**Maturity signal
**As IGA matures, low-risk, well-understood access is certified automatically, leaving humans to focus on exceptions and true risk.
8. Reduction in risky identities and entitlements
What to track
- Number of orphaned accounts
- Number of overprivileged users
- High-risk access findings over time
**Why it matters
**This is where IGA stops being theoretical. Fewer high-risk identities means less exposure, fewer audit findings, and a smaller blast radius.
**Maturity signal
**Advanced programs show steady, measurable declines in unnecessary access rather than temporary cleanups during audit season and automated remediation of new-found high-risk access.
9. Translating time savings into real cost reduction
What to track
- Hours saved per process (reviews, request processing, incident response, etc.)
- Equivalent FTE time recovered
- Reduction in outsourced or overtime work
**Why it matters
**Security leaders need to justify investment. Translating automation into recovered time and cost makes the value concrete and allows for strategic project planning.
**Maturity signal
**High-maturity teams can confidently quantify how identity automation frees staff to work on higher-value initiatives.
10. Measuring risk reduction over time
What to track
- Baseline identity risk assessment
- Ongoing reduction in standing privileges, orphaned accounts, and excessive access
- Risk trends across users, apps, and environments
**Why it matters
**Ultimately, IGA exists to reduce risk. Measuring change over time turns identity from a compliance function into a security control.
**Maturity signal
**The most mature programs treat identity risk as a continuous signal, not a quarterly exercise.
Measuring what matters
By tracking these metrics, teams can move beyond “we did the work” toward “the work made us safer, faster, and more productivet.”
If you are mapping your own journey, use these success metrics alongside our Path to IGA Maturity guide to understand not just where you are, but whether you are truly making progress.
