Solution Brief: Reduce IT Friction - Automate the Identity Lifecycle to Streamline IT Operations

Executive Summary

Whether it is a large enterprise or a company growing at a fast pace, when it comes to managing the identity lifecycle, IT teams become a bottleneck for providing access and a security risk when it’s time to remove it.

Manual processes and automation through scripts that require ongoing maintenance is how many companies choose to manage onboarding, transitions and offboarding often to realize that with the pace of change in the business and increased adoption of cloud applications these approaches cannot scale. A modern identity lifecycle management to streamline operations, provide day one access, and prevent former users retaining business accounts is required.

Such an identity strategy helps businesses increase agility by deploying a single identity architecture, and facilitating change through automating many IT lifecycles. Businesses that embrace this change are able to decrease costs, increase efficiency and their security posture at the same time.

The Challenge: Increasing Pace of Change

If there is any constant in modern business and IT, it’s change.

• Companies who used to have a handful of applications to manage for just their core employee base, now adopt cloud services in the tens or hundreds, adding new ones every month.

• IT is now managing an increasing amount of identities that are considered non-employee.

• Compounding reality is the fact that IT organizations are constantly being asked to do more with less. To provide value to shareholders, IT organizations push for efficiency, which often means making tough prioritization choices.

There’s a desire to focus on innovation so the business can keep growing, but agility, availability and cost, often become the focus.

Integration periods stifle innovation, along with on-prem system failures, slow onboarding process that impacts the entire company, as well as an overwhelming amounts of service requests directed at IT. Security is also applying pressure, with risk of breach from error prone manual process and lack of visibility into who has access to what.

 

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Business areas impacted from manual identity lifecycle management

 

Left unchecked these impacts become a massive burden:

40% of the workforce is going to be flexible (non-employee) by 2020 from 20% today

81% of employees admitted to using unauthorized SaaS applications

73% of IT leaders agreed that keeping track of identity and permissions across environments is a primary challenge

Providing Day One Access

A survey, held by Okta’s partner ServiceNow, found that 8 in 10 companies both large and small, still use unstructured manual tools such as email, spreadsheets and even personal visits to drive routine work processes, and fewer than 1 in 10 have automated applications assignment for employee onboarding. The result is frustrated and unproductive employees, and an overwhelmed IT department.

Modern organizations provide self-service tools like password reset or access requests, throu