How would your employees rate your ability to help them stay productive? Are they satisfied with the ease with which their access requests are met? Are your new hires still waiting at their desks to obtain application accesses to start their work?
Reports say that one-third of employees know whether they would be willing to stay with the company long term on their first week itself. This further exemplifies the importance of the first-day experience for an employee. Empowering them with the ability to get productive on day one instills a feeling of accomplishment which adds to their experience.
Onboarding an employee, providing the right access, and enabling them to be productive throughout their association with your organization is a collaborative effort between HR, IT, and the respective department supervisors—combining this with manually carrying out access related tasks, and you have yourself an error-prone method which leaves productivity and security behind.
User lifecycle management
Lifecycle management is essentially creating records of digital identities, maintaining them, providing them with the accesses they need—from the day they arrive to the day they depart.
A lot of loopholes can exist in this process when they are done manually. Be it creating their identity on a directory, providing access on day one, provisioning applications to employees, deprovisioning these accesses, managing their entitlements, or even responding to various access requests.
It takes up tremendous IT time to provide access regularly. Provisioning the day one accesses take up to 30 minutes on an average for every new hire. Now, multiply that with several new hires in a day.
Not to ignore the fact that workplaces are adapting newer methods to make work as feasible as possible for employees. An illustration of it is the increase in remote work approach where the employee can work out of a co-working space, café, or even the comfort of their own home.
Yet, 38% of the employees have expressed dissatisfaction over the kind of technical support or expertise they get while working remotely. While organizations seem to be moving towards a modern work culture, there are gaps in this process— largely due to the heap of manual tasks that are solely tended to by the IT administrator.
The work culture today is also quite dynamic, with roles and responsibilities changing now and then. The roles of employees are much more flexible and diverse, with unique accesses needed for all—adding to this are interdepartmental transfers, change of work location, or when an employee moves out of the organization. In such cases, access to the resources must keep up with the movements in the employee’s lifecycle.
Importance of automation in today’s work culture
As companies grow with a multitude of roles, applications, and expansion of departments, the manual processes simply don’t work. The only way to remain compliant, secure, and efficient is to automate the user lifecycle management.
An automated solution like that of Cross Identity will allow you to make day one provisioning a seamless process. Identities that are created on Active Directory, LDAP, or even Cross Identity directory are automatically synced with the solution. The predefined applications which can be web, SAML, or even thick client are provided based on the role of the employee. Now your new hires can be productive from day one. This drastically reduces IT time.
All the applications are provisioned based on the roles that are defined, any additional request for accesses can be made and the concerned manager can approve or disapprove the access. This allows employees to carry on with their work with ease, saving a lot of time. Also, the applications can be deprovisioned with ease as well when the employee no longer needs it.
Simplifying this further, employees are segregated into accounts, roles, and groups to define the applications which an employee can have—these are the employees’ “access rights” in the organization based on their role and must be provided by default. This greatly reduces any confusion or manual intervention to understand who has access to what. This process of entitlement management leaves no room for error and allows your employees to obtain access instantly.
Automating user lifecycle management will allow you to set streamline workflows which are the predefined rules for your end-users to automate account provisioning.
Enabling stringent policies with streamlined processes to provide applications for all the movements in an organization, joiners, leavers, transfers, and any other change in the role of an employee will help you remain compliant. This is magnified with the availability of dashboards associated with these solutions that provide a clear view of all your employee accesses.
As organizations expand, they acquire more companies, collaborate with more partners, and also have contractors for various functionalities. For such a vast network of employees with ever-changing roles, automating the user’s lifecycle is not just a luxury to save time but a necessity to enforce security.
Unwanted access in the wrong hands could lead to the misuse of data at their disposal. As employees leave, if their accesses aren’t revoked, this again leaves room for violation of access. Orphan accounts could leave unclaimed accesses wherein an imposter could take over and infringe sensitive data.
An interesting fact is that by 2020, Gen Z (the generation born after 1995) will comprise 36% of the Global Workforce. This means that the generation has mainly lived in the era of technological advancements, and is more comfortable with automated processes as opposed to the traditional solutions. They will be part of your workforce and that number will only increase. Your employees are only going to get more inclined to technology-driven workforce management so you must move towards it as well.
Grow with technology
It is essential that along with prioritizing the productivity of your organization offerings, you empower your employees—who are the ones leading you to productivity. Allowing them to work efficiently, even remotely, quickly providing them the accesses they need all the while maintaining security and staying compliant. With solutions like Cross Identity available in the Identity and access management domain, it is thoroughly easy for you to obtain the technology which keeps up with the changing times.
Empower your employees today to empower your business.
