Automation
• 7 min read
Reasons to Automate Identity Lifecycle Management in 2024
28th November, 2023
SHARE ON:
An automated ILM system helps companies streamline their processes and become more efficient, positively impacting business outcomes. In this article, we'll delve into the various benefits of automating ILM and explore how Zluri can help your business do so.
Imagine this scenario: A new employee has just joined a prestigious company and is excited to get started. However, when they arrive at the office on their first day, they realize their limited access to company resources.
In addition, they need help accessing certain documents, systems, and applications and communicating with their team. Frustrated and overwhelmed, they question whether this job is right for them.
Imagine if the company had an efficient way of managing the employee's digital identity and associated permissions. The IT operations team would have automatically granted employees the access they needed to do their job, allowing them to hit the ground running from day one.
And when it's time for the employee to move on to a new opportunity, the process of revoking their permissions would be seamless, ensuring that company resources are secure.
This is where identity lifecycle management comes in. It's a way to automate and streamline the process of managing digital identities, ensuring that employees have the right permissions at the right time while also protecting against security vulnerabilities. With identity lifecycle management, companies can improve productivity, reduce IT workload, and maintain high levels of security.
So, if you're tired of manual processes and security exposures for managing digital identities, it's time to consider implementing identity lifecycle management. It could be the key to unlocking your company's full potential.
What is Identity Lifecycle Management?
Identity lifecycle management is a process that helps organizations manage the digital identities of employees, contractors, partners, and customers. This involves tracking these individuals' evolving relationships and access privileges as they interact with the organization and adapting digital identities accordingly.
ILM ensures that the right people have access to the right resources at the right time while also protecting the organization against unauthorized access and breaches. Organizations can effectively improve efficiency, security, and compliance by managing the digital identity lifecycle.
Key Phases of Identity Lifecycle Management
ILM involves managing the entire lifecycle of an individual's identity, from creation and initial provisioning to maintenance and eventual removal or deprovisioning.
There are several key phases of ILM:
1. Creating Identities
The process of creating a new employee's digital identity is an essential step in the identity lifecycle management process. During this phase, HR gathers relevant personal information from the employee and uses it to create their digital identity in an HRIS tool. This digital identity is typically associated with a role or title within the organization and is used to manage access to various systems and resources.
2. Onboarding
After a new employee's digital identity has been created in HR's software, it is also vital to ensure that it is created within the IT infrastructure. One way to efficiently and securely manage digital identity creation and maintenance is through integrated HRIS tools with IT systems. When these tools are integrated, creating a new employee's digital identity in the HRIS tool can be automatically imported into the IT software.
3. Monitoring, Reporting, and Maintaining
In the third phase of the identity lifecycle management process, monitoring access levels is critical to ensure that no accounts have more or fewer privileges than they should. This helps prevent security breaches and ensures that the system operates smoothly. In addition, reporting on identities and access allows you to demonstrate compliance with security standards and prove that the system is being used appropriately.
Ongoing access maintenance is also crucial during this phase, as it helps to update access levels as roles or responsibilities change within the organization.
4. Offboarding
Offboarding is the final phase of identity lifecycle management and is essential to maintaining security within an organization. When an employee leaves the company, it is essential to revoke their access to any resources and deprovision their identity in a timely, complete, and secure manner. This helps to prevent ex-employees from retaining access to the organization's resources, which can be a potential security threat.
The IT department's responsibility is to ensure that offboarding is carried out correctly to protect the organization's data and systems.
Benefits of An Automated Identity Lifecycle Management
1. Efficient provisioning and deprovisioning
One of the benefits of automating ILM is that new employees can be granted access to the resources they need almost instantly. This helps to improve productivity and efficiency, as employees no longer have to wait for manual approval and provisioning processes to be completed.
Additionally, automating these processes reduces the risk of errors, as the process is standardized and does not rely on manual input. Finally, the deprovisioning process is also streamlined when identities are deleted, as all required accesses are automatically revoked. This helps to ensure that former employees or contractors no longer have access to sensitive company information.
2. Automated Identity Governance
Automating ILM allows organizations to manage and update roles, permissions, and rights in real-time. Organizations can ensure that only authorized employees have access to the resources. This reduces the risk of data breaches and other security threats.
Automating identity governance also makes organizations compliant with regulations and industry standards to ensure that access to sensitive information is strictly controlled and monitored.
3. Better Password Management
One of the key benefits of automating ILM is the ability to synchronize passwords across applications. This reduces the risk of password-related security breaches and improves the overall security of employee and organization data. Users can also reset or change their passwords as needed. In addition, users can access the systems and resources whenever they need them securely.
4. Overall Visibility
The automated Identity Lifecycle Management process provides a holistic overview of all digital entities within an organization and their corresponding permissions. This helps organizations ensure that they are complying with regulations and best practices for data management. They can also help organizations optimize how they use their data, identify opportunities to retire or delete unnecessary data, or move data to more cost-effective storage options as it becomes less active.
5. Enhanced Security
Creating well-defined roles and implementing automated deprovisioning can be essential steps for managing user privileges and ensuring the security of an organization's data. Defining roles clearly can ensure that users only have the privileges and access to data they need to do their jobs. This prevents the risk of accidental or malicious data breaches and makes it easier for users to understand what they are authorized to access.
Top 5 Reasons To Automate Identity Lifecycle Management
An automated ILM solution can help organizations be more productive by streamlining managing user identities and access rights. For example, a computerized solution can handle tasks such as provisioning new users, revoking access for former employees, and updating permissions. This can save time and reduce the risk of errors, helping organizations to be more efficient and effective in managing access to their resources.
Here are the top 5 reasons highlighting the need to automate identity lifecycle management.
1. Improving time-efficiency
Manually provisioning users can be time-consuming, particularly in organizations with many applications and roles that frequently onboard new employees or contractors. Automating the identity lifecycle management process can help to save time and improve efficiency by streamlining the process of granting access to applications and resources.
2. Streamlining collaboration and communication
Talent acquisition teams inform the IT department when a new employee is hired, usually through email. This can be a manual process that requires IT administrators to create accounts and grant access to the necessary applications and resources.
With an automated ILM process, IT teams can automatically import new employee information from TA teams and create required accounts in systems like Active Directory, Google Apps, or Office 365. This streamlines the process of onboarding new employees and reduces the workload for IT administrators.
3. On-demand access with reduced complexity
Managing access to applications and resources can be complex, especially in organizations that have a large number of teams with different roles and responsibilities. Automating ILM helps you manage access to applications and resources centrally.
Different teams require access to various software tools and resources. Once the IT teams know who needs access to which tool and resource, granting and monitoring access become more manageable. This way, an automated ILM reduces the level of complexity included in giving access to multiple people.
4. Secure provisioning
Automated provisioning can improve security in several ways. It reduces the risk of unauthorized access or data breaches. Automation also helps organizations better track and monitor user access by providing a clear record of users' access to which resources. Finally, automated provisioning can help to ensure that users are deprovisioned from applications when they leave the organization, reducing the risk of "zombie accounts" or other security vulnerabilities.
5. In-depth analytics
Automating ILM provides valuable insights to IT administrators about user accounts. You get information about the users' accounts and access, including their access, when their accounts were created, when they need to be terminated, when their access was last updated, who started their accounts, and which apps they have access to.
How Zluri Helps Automate User Lifecycle
Zluri is a SaaS and Lifecycle management platform that offers automation solutions for the entire employee lifecycle. With Zluri, you can provide new employees with everything they need on their first day, automate your SaaS approval process for mid-lifecycle changes, and securely deprovision employees when they leave the company.
Onboarding
With Zluri, gone are the days when new employees had to wait weeks to access the tools they needed to do their job, leading to frustration and a drop in productivity. Instead, automation allows organizations to provide new hires with everything they need on their first day.
But Zluri doesn't stop there. It also offers contextual app recommendations based on the employee's department and the role and intelligent in-app suggestions that help you add them to the channels, groups, or projects they'll be working on. In addition, Zluri's onboarding workflows let you create 'playbooks' (collections of recommended apps for automation) for different roles, so you can quickly onboard new hires with just a few clicks.
Whether you're a content writer who needs Slack, Trello, and Grammarly or someone in a different role with different tools, Zluri has you covered.
Mid-lifecycle
As an employee progresses through their career, they may need new tools and resources to aid in their work. But obtaining these resources can be tedious, involving multiple approvals and long waiting periods. That's where the Employee App Store from Zluri comes in.
With the Employee App Store, you can streamline and automate the process of approving and assigning new software and licenses to your employees. This saves your HR and IT teams time and gives your employees greater autonomy and control over the tools they use.
In addition to reducing wait times, the Employee App Store also helps to decentralize SaaS procurement decisions, allowing employees to make informed choices about the apps they need. And with real-time updates and transparent communication, the approval process is made more efficient and transparent. By providing employees with easy access to the tools they need, you can help prevent SaaS sprawl and eliminate shadow IT. And by automating repetitive tasks like SaaS approval, you free up your team to focus on more strategic work.
If you want to make mid-lifecycle changes easier and more efficient for your employees, consider using the Employee App Store from Zluri. It's a simple solution that can significantly impact your organization's productivity and success.
Offboarding
Offboarding employees can be time-consuming and tedious, but Zluri's automated offboarding process becomes a breeze. Not only do you save time and effort, but you also keep your data secure.
When an employee leaves your organization, Zluri revokes their access to all devices, apps, and systems to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data. It then backs up the employee's data and transfers it to a new owner, ensuring that important information is not lost.
Finally, Zluri revokes the employee's licenses and removes their single sign-on (SSO) access, ensuring they can no longer use any of the organization's applications. By following these simple steps, you can efficiently and securely offboard your employees every time.
Zluri streamlines and simplifies managing the employee identity lifecycle, eliminating the need for cumbersome approvals. Whether you need to add a new hire to the system, assign necessary applications, update personal information, or disable access for a departing employee, Zluri makes it easy with a single click.
If you want to learn more about how Zluri can revolutionize identity lifecycle management for your company, don't hesitate to book a demo with us today!
Related Blogs
See More
Subscribe to our Newsletter
Get updates in your inbox
