No matter what area of identity governance and administration you’re dealing with—managing identity lifecycles, handling access requests, trying to balance doing access certifications right and doing them fast—you’ve got your work cut out for you. Given the complexity and challenges of handling all these tasks for a highly dynamic user community, success depends on simplifying, standardizing and automating wherever you can, by applying technology effectively. Here are some ideas for how to do that.
Streamline Access Certifications
In a previous post, we explored how identity governance technology can simplify the access certification review process leveraging analytics and automation—for example, automatically flagging clear compliance violations or those that require closer inspection, rather than demanding that reviewers give equal attention to all the information they’re reviewing, regardless of its relative criticality. To make the most of the technology tools that are available to them, identity governance and administration teams can empower the business user to make more access decisions based on prioritized actions from the Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) team. Identity governance and administration technology that applies analytics and automation also means reviewers do not require business context to understand what they’re reviewing. What’s more, with this technology, IGA teams can have more confidence that any decisions made are accurate.
Act Quickly on Access Requests
Access requests present a dual challenge for identity governance and administration: making sure access to resources is secure, and also making sure that legitimate users can quickly and easily get access to resources to do their jobs. An efficient process workflow to verify whether someone should be granted the access they request is vital to acting quickly on access requests and delivering access in a way that’s both secure and convenient. Sound identity and access management practices and technologies are critical to making access request workflows as efficient as they can be. As the access request process matures, organizations can look to automate provisioning and policy enhancements to further reduce both risk and effort.
Create an Efficient, Compliant Lifecycle Process for Users
Every organization has its own “Joiner, Mover and Leaver” process to manage access entitlements and roles for users as they transition through various roles and responsibilities in their career with the organization. What makes this process especially complex today is the broad range of people who join, move through and leave. They’re just as likely to be customers, contractors or vendors as they are company employees. And even if they are employees, they may be temporary or permanent, remote or on-site, full-time or part-time. How do you create an efficient lifecycle management process for delivering the right levels of access for so many different types of users and ensure that when that access is no longer needed it is removed promptly? It starts with mapping the process for gathering data. Once that’s done, technology can help streamline the collection of information from multiple sources—HR information, AD data, application data and more—to define users’ identities and manage them through the entire time they’re associated with the organization.
Learn what enterprises today are doing to make identity and access management programs more strategic and effective, in the IDG Market Pulse Report Rethinking IAM: How a Risk-Based, Automated Approach Makes Identity and Access Management More Strategic and Effective.