Gartner defines identity governance and administration (IGA) as the solution to manage the identity life cycle and govern access across on-premises and cloud environments. To accomplish this, IGA tools aggregate and correlate disparate identity and access rights data, and provide full capability controls over accounts and associated access. IGA solutions also fulfill the purpose of unifying and correlating identity data for organizations with multiple person and machine identity authoritative sources. This is done to provide a single view of identity (system of record) for their dependent processes and systems
Gartner defines user authentication as the journey-time process that provides credence in a claim to an identity established for a person for access to digital assets. User authentication is delivered by some combination of (a) an authenticator, (b) signals evaluation and (c) an authentication decision point, which may be from different vendors. User authentication is used to provide credence in an identity claim for a person already known to an organization. The credence must be sufficient to bring account takeover (ATO) risks within the organization’s risk tolerance. User authentication is foundational to and protects the value of other functions with an organization’s identity fabric, namely: runtime authorization, especially segregation of duties (SOD); audit (individual accountability); and identity analytics.