Regarding Identity Lifecycle Management, we mean a system that manages an employee’s access to your organization’s systems. It includes the onboarding process, access provisioning, updating, and revoking.
It ensures that only the right users can access what they need at any given time, reducing your chance of data breaches. It also lets you show auditors that your security processes are working correctly.
Increased Security
A business must ensure that its employees are securely and adequately assigned access rights to systems, applications, and data required to perform their job. Unfortunately, humans are the weakest link in any security system, and they can easily slip into bad practices that expose an organization to risks, downtime, and even a data breach.
It is why it is essential to have Identity Lifecycle Management use cases for businesses. These systems control the entire process of someone gaining access to the information within a company’s network.
For example, when employees get hired, they get a new account with unique user credentials and access privileges that allow them to work effectively within the organization. The account will continue to be used as they move up in the company, and eventually, it will be downgraded and removed if they leave or have no reason to use their access any longer.
Identity lifecycle management solutions offer a variety of administrative tools for onboarding and offboarding users, managing access privileges throughout their tenure, and automating approval workflows and centralized monitoring. These features reduce IT and security staff’s time spent on identity-related tasks and free them up to focus on higher-level work that promotes productivity and growth.
Increased Productivity
Identity lifecycle management ensures that users can access the systems, applications, and data they need to perform their jobs. It is done by creating, modifying, and de-provisioning their digital identities and any privileges they may have.
For example, when an employee joins the company and starts work, their digital identity should be created so that they have access to all of the systems and applications that they need to do their job. Then, they should be fine with making their identity again when they get promoted, leave the company, or change organizational roles.
As organizations grow and more employees come on board, the number of user accounts, associated permissions, and entitlements in application environments can add up. Maintaining these accounts, approvals, and entitlements can become an overwhelming manual IT task that takes up valuable resources and time.
By automating the entire identity lifecycle, companies can eliminate the need for employees and contractors to contact the help desk to request access rights or update their account information. It saves them time and money while freeing up the IT department to focus on more impactful projects.
Businesses considering boosting their security posture and increasing productivity should invest in a comprehensive identity lifecycle management solution. It can provide administrative tools for onboarding and offboarding employees and grant, modify and revoke access rights in a centralized, secure environment built with strong policy engines.
Reduced Costs
When appropriately implemented, identity lifecycle management can help organizations save money by reducing their time on IT administration tasks. It is because it automates many processes that traditionally took up a lot of IT resources, such as onboarding and offboarding users and handling job role changes.
Moreover, an IAM system can also help companies manage the identity and access of their business applications, which helps reduce costs by avoiding costly mistakes. For instance, an IAM solution can automatically update the user’s account if an application is updated to reflect the new changes.
Another reason identity lifecycle management is helpful for businesses is that it can improve security by ensuring employees have the correct privileges at all times. It can be achieved by implementing the principle of least privilege, which ensures that no one has more access rights than they need to do their jobs.
Finally, identity lifecycle management can improve productivity by reducing IT staff’s time on user account creation and management. As a result, it can free up more senior IT professionals’ time to focus on other vital projects.
IAM solutions can help companies secure their networks by entitling users to specific apps and revoking access when they leave the organization. It can be achieved by integrating identity lifecycle management with automation and provisioning tools. It allows businesses to create an identity lifecycle process that logs and time-stamps all lifecycle transactions, allowing IT departments to track who has access to which apps and when they were de-provisioned.
Increased Customer Satisfaction
Identity lifecycle management for businesses involves managing user accounts from onboarding to departure, provisioning, updating, or revoking access to applications and resources as needed. It helps ensure users remain productive and that no one is left behind in the organization.
As networks and infrastructures become more complex and cloud access by remote workers becomes commonplace, non-human identities such as SSH keys, API keys, and IoT devices also need to be managed. Unfortunately, managing these identity siloes requires significant manual IT efforts that automated identity lifecycle management solutions can avoid.
