Business leaders and IT teams are responsible for protecting access to sensitive information. This requires a robust IAM system with granular permission settings. Human error in the service of access requests often leads to violations of security, privacy, and compliance regulations. These errors can include excessive access, inappropriate groups, and the need for a continuous monitoring process.
Reduced Risk of Data Breach
The average data breach costs a company over $1 million, making it an expensive and embarrassing business risk. And the stakes are even higher for organizations that use manual access management processes.
When IT admins manually add users, update permissions, and deactivate accounts in multiple systems, it’s easy to make errors. These errors can result in excess access privileges that cybercriminals could exploit.
As security threats increase, IT teams must continuously adapt their IAM systems. Automated access management can scale to handle large-scale environments with many applications, methods, and users. These systems can also provide a more intuitive and user-friendly review process, which can help reduce the number of human errors that may occur during access reviews. Furthermore, automated IAM can track the actions of all users with an audit trail. This can help to prove compliance with regulatory standards like PCI-DSS, HIPAA, GLBA, and SOX. This helps mitigate the risk of a security breach by ensuring that only authorized employees can access sensitive information or restricted resources.
Additionally, the ability to automatically deactivate a user’s account after they leave the company or their role changes can significantly reduce the risk of a data breach. This is because the sensitive data will be replaced with tokens that can only be converted into accurate information if the hacker can access the original system.
Increased Productivity
The ability to provision access rights quickly and easily for new hires, existing employees, contractors, and business partners is crucial for boosting team productivity. However, manual user administration can be time-consuming and frustrating without the right tools. A lack of automation in these processes often delays and rework due to human error. An automated identity and access management system (IAM) uses a combination of policies, procedures, tools, and controls to provide and manage the appropriate level of access for users to applications and data. This allows organizations to grant varying access levels for different users and groups of users based on roles and permissions defined in the IAM system. IAM solutions also enable administrators to get more granular with their licenses, allowing them to determine the time of day that an employee or group of employees can access systems, what types of devices they can use, and what specific information they can transmit, among other criteria. These capabilities allow companies to secure sensitive data and prevent security breaches while improving employee productivity. Automating IAM reduces the burden on IT and HR departments, enabling them to serve business needs quickly. Companies can streamline service by implementing a modern, robust IAM tool that combines an online request process with a fulfillment engine and intelligent access analytics while saving valuable IT resources for more pressing projects.
Improved Security
Streamlining the process of accessing information and resources allows employees to request access necessary for their job duties more efficiently. This improves security by adhering to the principle of least privilege and reducing the likelihood of unauthorized data breaches. In addition, automated access requests include detailed information about what access is requested when it is asked for, by whom, and for what purpose, which creates a documented audit trail of sensitive data access. Automating the management of access requests allows business leaders and IT approvers to spend less time assessing risk factors and more time reviewing the actual work that needs to be done. This improves the overall efficiency of the approval and fulfillment process, reduces approval delays, and increases available cycles for other projects.
Additionally, it makes it easier to implement mitigating controls such as an automatic review date or an end date for the request. IAM solutions can also incorporate additional security measures like two-factor authentication, which requires users to use a combination of something they know (like a password) and something they have (such as a mobile phone or security token). This makes it more difficult for hackers to gain unauthorized access and can prevent costly internal data breaches. This type of extra layer of protection is essential for organizations that must meet stringent compliance regulations, such as HIPAA and GDPR.
Streamlined Onboarding Process
New hires need to be able to access the documents, tools, and resources they need to perform their job functions. Having these in one place will prevent miscommunication and make it easier for team members to collaborate effectively and resolve customer issues quickly. In addition, it’s essential to provide employees with the training materials they need to quickly get up to speed on their new roles. This could include videos, webinars, or recorded presentations. Providing this information in advance will reduce the time needed for onboarding, and employees can easily access it at any point. Finally, it is also a good idea to provide new hires with a clear roadmap of their expectations and performance metrics. This can be done through regular check-in meetings with their supervisor and ongoing feedback surveys that team members and peers can complete. A great onboarding process is critical to ensuring employee retention and a vital, collaborative digital workplace in 2023 and beyond. It’s estimated that organizations with a solid onboarding process improve new hire retention by 82%. That’s why it’s essential to make onboarding easy, whether your employees are in-office or remote.