What is identity governance and administration in education?

You already know how important identity is to your school or district. Making sure students and staff have secure access to the right resources is crucial for teaching and learning. You might already be using identity and access management (IAM) to manage passwords and authentication.

IAM helps you provide users — human or otherwise — with access. But how do you know if they should have access? Or if this access meets regulatory and compliance requirements? That’s where identity governance and administration (IGA) comes in.

What is identity governance and administration?

Identity governance and administration (IGA) is the practice of managing, monitoring and auditing who has access to what across your school. It controls the conditions for access:

• Who can access what
• When they can access it
• How long access is allowed

IGA has to work across your entire tech stack, understanding context based on different sources, regardless of where they’re hosted. IGA makes sure that access is compliant, productive for students and staff, visible to your IT team and secure, so users only have least privilege access.

Why does IGA matter?

Access permissions change constantly. Students enroll, transfer and graduate, staff change roles, licenses shift and so on. And now, identities go beyond your human users to non-human identities, like agentic AI tools that can take autonomous actions. In early 2026, machine identities per human in the enterprise hit 109:1, with this number expected to only increase. Schools are likely to follow this trend too. Can you keep up?

Schools need visibility into and control of the entire identity lifecycle, from provisioning to deprovisioning; this is the best way to prove that the right people and tools are accessing and using your resources appropriately. And the most reliable way to know you’re meeting student privacy and audit requirements. That’s what IGA is built to do.

What should an IGA solution include?

Not all IGA solutions are created equal. An effective IGA solution should include continuous, automated governance, AI-driven intelligence, and coverage across every identity, data source, app and security tool in your environment.

IGA should be automated and continuous.

IGA is shifting quickly to keep up with the demands from users with unique permissions and actions, namely agentic AI. Student privacy regulations, district policies and standard process changes constantly evolve the conditions for access IGA enforces. Periodic checks or quarterly access certifications to check the status of your identities aren’t enough anymore, especially when hundreds or thousands of accounts change at the start of each term. Orphaned accounts, like a graduated student’s or a former teacher’s, can go unnoticed and agents could be created outside normal processes — the best way to catch these is with continuous monitoring.

IGA needs intelligence to keep up.

With hundreds or thousands (and growing) identities to manage, IGA with integrated machine learning (ML) and AI is better at catching noncompliance. ML and AI let IGA go beyond standard operations, like flagging unused accounts after a certain period of time or basic risk scoring.

ML helps IGA identify outliers, like if one person has unusual permissions compared to the rest of their peers. It can help recommend next steps or provide more advanced risk scoring from multiple sources.

These capabilities have been around, but now, IGA is shifting its capabilities to generative and agentic AI. With AI, IGA can watch activity in close to real time and flag unusual behavior. It can summarize the context a reviewer would need to approve or deny a teacher’s request for access to a new app. It can act autonomously to revoke access and improve workflows. But even with AI, IGA is only as good as the information it can see.

IGA needs to cover all your bases.

How can your IGA platform know if a user or agent should be given access to a certain resource? It needs context for a full picture, including:

• All identity types: Students, teachers, staff, contractors, AI agents and more all have entry points into your system.
• Every source of identity data: A student information system (SIS) provides enrollment, schedule and graduation changes for students. An HR system does the same for staff, with start dates, role changes and departures. Directories hold account status and group memberships. Records for substitutes, volunteers, contractors and vendors might live in a different repository (or nowhere at all). Apps hold the permissions each user has, like read-only, edit or admin. And AI agents are often created by individual staff in AI tools or apps, sometimes without a clear owner. All of this information helps IGA determine whether access should be granted, changed or removed.
• All apps and environments: IGA needs to be a central authority for access governance. It needs to connect to as many apps as possible, from your learning management system to classroom tools, even ones that are difficult to connect to. This is true regardless of whether it’s on cloud/SaaS or on premises. This makes it easier to secure and provision accounts in those apps, especially with AI-enabled connectors.
• The rest of your security stack: IGA works best in tandem with the rest of your security stack. For example, a device’s compliance status, as reported by your device management or endpoint security tools, can inform governance decisions, like raising a user’s risk score or triggering an access review. Connecting these tools gives IGA a fuller view of risk across your environment.

Keep up with evolving identity governance requirements

You already know how fast generative and agentic AI moves. Staying on top of your identity governance requires a platform that covers all identity types, offers environment-wide visibility and frees your IT team to spend less time managing accounts and more time supporting teaching and learning.

Looking for more guidance on where IGA is headed? Gartner covers the market in its 2026 Gartner® Market Guide for Identity Governance and Administration, where Jamf is recognized as a Representative Vendor.

Gartner, Market Guide for Identity Governance and Administration, R. Archambault, B. Guthrie, P. Mezzera, S. Wessels, 28 August 2026.

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