IAM workflows and how they benefit you

By Sidsel Loyche - 25 Mar, 2022
IAM
4 Minutes Read

To be effective, an IAM solution must faithfully model an organisation’s people, policies and processes. ​What does this look like for your organisation?

A modern IAM solution achieves this using workflows. These manage your users’ identity lifecycles; provisions and deprovisions their access to the ever-growing list of IT resources; as well as many other IAM-related business processes.  When choosing the right IAM solution for you, consider the following:

Onboarding and offboarding

How will you ensure that your users are onboarded correctly and have access to everything that they need to do their job? And how will you terminate their access when they depart?

Onboarding and offboarding members of staff is an arduous task for all organisations. It is vital that you ensure new employees receive the right permissions and access to allow them to perform their roles effectively, whilst ensuring that security isn’t compromised. The same is true when an employee leaves an organisation. It is essential that the offboarding process immediately revokes any access permissions, which could otherwise compromise security.

End-User Self-Service

What should end users be able to do themselves, and what do you want to retain control over?

Take password resets. These consume 20-50% of helpdesk calls in most companies. Assuming an average cost of £20 per help-desk call and a workforce of 3000 employees, the annual cost for password resets is around £240,000. And that’s just passwords. Consider the effort expended by the helpdesk and other staff to perform all the repetitive approvals and configuration changes to manually provision a user with access to a service. An IAM solution can eliminate a significant amount of IT help-desk costs and improve productivity through self-service and workflow-driven automation of repetitive tasks.

Flexibility

You need secure access, secure sharing, and secure authentication for your business to thrive. While all businesses share similar processes, the details and specifics will always vary. It’s important to understand that a one-size-fits-all approach to IAM won’t work – every business will need its own unique solution that wraps around its policies and procedures. Look at your existing IAM solution and ask: is the tail is wagging the dog?

Our solution, Able+

Many IAM products need specialists to translate the business’ requirements into complex configuration and code. This can be costly and result in configuration and code that can be opaque to others. Our solution, Able+, offers a unique, visual editor enabling non-specialists to design and manage workflows themselves.

Efficient on- and off-boarding of users is critical. And because change is constant, it’s essential that their authorisations remain consistent with their evolving roles. Able+ makes this simple using templates and workflows. These contain all the business logic needed to automatically manage a user’s identity and privileges. By automating the application of IT policies and assigning complex business rules through an IAM solution such as Able+, you can ensure that people are assigned permissions at role level. These roles will automatically give employees access to a predetermined set of applications and resources. What historically could take days to process, can be done in seconds, at the touch of a button. Authentication is also made easy for users with single sign-on (SSO) and made more secure with multifactor authentication (MFA) when needed.

A digital business is often dependent on an effective IT helpdesk.​ Able+ is designed with self-service in mind to reduce the number of tickets and keep costs down. This means that users are happier and more productive, and your helpdesk can work more strategically. To further support users and make work more effective, Able+ has been designed using the latest web standards, validated with comprehensive testing, to give your users a great experience regardless of their device.​ This means that your organisation can safely embrace BYOD.

An automated cost saving solution is the service catalogue within Able+. Users are often unaware of the services that they are entitled to use. This means that the business is paying for under-used services, while users are missing opportunities to do their jobs better. Able+ draws users’ attention to their entitlements via the service catalogue. And because it’s generated dynamically, based on each user’s access permissions, it is always up-to-date.

More information

If you would like to know more about access management, please visit our Able+ pages

 

Author: Sidsel Loyche

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