Okta and IDMWORKS teamed up during our IAM Pro Series to provide insight on a topic that has been troublesome for IAM teams for decades: the identity lifecycle challenge. What happens when a new employee is recruited? What’s the process for when an employee moves to another branch or department? What should you do when an employee leaves?
There are now solutions and tools set up to automate how users are created, how identity and access is managed as users change roles and how you handle the clean-up after users leave. Organizations are all familiar with the joiner, mover, leaver processes.
To begin, you need to understand why HR as a master is important. HR is the backbone to solve the joiner, mover, leaver challenge. If you can successfully automate lifecycle management, you can:
- Improve productivity
- Decrease security risk
- Improve new hire experience
Improve productivity:
When you are thinking of automation in customer-facing terms, it makes sense. You want it to be a smooth process, you don’t want long ticket times and you want to reduce the back and forth as much as possible. This should be the same when thinking internally. When you rely on your internal HR team to control employee lifecycle management, it becomes a burden that no one wants to bear. Imagine if you continued to pay an employee who left because something slipped through the crack?
Decrease security risk:
There was once a story told by the FBI about a disgruntled employee who was fired from an organization. This employee never had access turned off and went to a competing firm with company secrets. Luckily, the competing firm had a good conscience and turned the ex-employee in, but imagine if they wouldn’t have?
Improve new hire experience:
For most new hires, the first day consists of meeting co-workers, dressing to impress, and getting credentials to start their job. When this process of onboarding relies on humans (specifically HR), it can take days or weeks to get up and running. This not only costs the company dollars but starts the employee off with a negative perception. Manual onboarding processes are not scalable – rapid hiring = rapid delays and loss of money.
Okta Provisioning will help you automate the identity lifecycle and maximize security, efficiency, and productivity. With this tool in place, you are able to:
- Eliminate the costly and error-prone manual processes associated with on- and off-boarding users
- Eliminate manual errors with on-boarding processes driven by automated policies, and close security gaps by eliminating access immediately when an employee, contractor, or partner leaves the organization or changes roles
- Show auditors automated on- and off-boarding procedures to help satisfy compliance, and take advantage of reporting to ease manual audit processes
Solving the joiner, mover, leaver problem doesn’t have to be a headache. IDMWORKS is a full-service IAM consulting firm and we are proud to partner with companies like Okta who are changing the Identity landscape.