Why Identity Lifecycle Management Matters

Strategies for Every Stage

The process of managing user IDs and access rights in an organization is termed as identity lifecycle management. This process involves creating, maintaining, updating, and removing access to resources within an identity system, while tracking each user from onboarding to sign-off and updating their access levels as they changes.

The goal of lifecycle management is to create a positive and a rewarding user experience at every stage. It is a process of managing user’s journey from the first time they onboarded into the system to the time they discontinue. As identity lifecycle management being an essential process in an enterprise, the ultimate objective is to provide a seamless experience at every stage.

During this whole journey, the HR systems plays a significant role in the user engagement process of onboarding, offboarding and maintenance. Thus, it is important to have a well-defined user lifecycle process in place as it helps to optimize user engagement and drive productivity from day 1.

In this article, I will describe about the Identity lifecycle management and automation enables an enterprise to foster efficiency in managing distributed workforce while maintaining security and compliance.

Identity Lifecycle Management – Risks and Realities

Improper lifecycle management poses several challenges to managing identities on a daily basis. For example: Making a decision about which Birthright permissions to use – Having too many permissions exposes’ users to vulnerabilities while having insufficient rights prevents them from accessing critical resources.

Similarly, employee Onboarding and granting day One Access – Many organizations even today use manual and document-heavy processes to accomplish critical workflows which brings challenges like fragmented onboarding, error-prone and time-consuming process which in turn cuts the new talent productivity and growth significantly.

Another aspect is how the user account is handled. It is common in many organizations to use an easily-decipherable common password when creating new accounts and it happens that the same default password is used for every new account created. – You know what I mean!

User Lifecycle workflow process

The user lifecycle is broken down into three major stages: The user onboarding, user management, and the user offboarding, – the core key stages!

A user onboarding process often starts with HR. When an employee joins the company, they for sure need an account in the active directory or in an Identity system. HR’s in such scenario’s typically has a checklist of the todo item or a tick-tick box form that they generally follow to ensure that the joiner process is handled properly and then sent to IT administration team for account creation.

User provisioning and maintenance starts as soon as the onboarding is done. The user will now be added onto the appropriate security groups so that they gain access to resources they need per their roles. Provisioning and maintenance are an essential part of the lifecycle management which could include updating the basic user information such as department, contact information, additional access request, a proper monitoring so to keep an eye on if any unauthorized access or if any potential security risks are imminent.

The user offboarding process starts whenever a user leaves the organization. All of the user’s access, rights, and the permissions are revoked from everywhere in this process. In the user lifespan, this is an important stage, the offboarding process makes sure that a user’s account is properly terminated, preventing from gaining access to resources without authorization.

It is needless to say that when all of these activities are done manually, takes lot of time and prone to errors.

ULM Automation workflow Strategies

The user or Identity lifecycle can be fully automated. In order to ensure that ILM continues in a consistent and secure manner, organizations should have procedures and guidelines in place. See! All of this can be automated with ease, just by properly designing the ILM process, integrating with right set of tools, and defining the ILM automation requirements so that the user identities and their access rights are effectively managed.

The automated workflow for creating a new identity in an HR system involves multiple steps that ensure the process is secure, efficient and requires no human interaction. Workflow for automatic identity management is initiated when HR creates a new user record in HRMS. With this the wheels are set in motion; this creates the account in the identity and access management system.

Automation workflows entail developing a systematic sequence of activities that an ILM automation tool will execute on its own in response to a trigger or if a condition is met. Common ILM steps such as creating new users, providing access, and deleting or deactivating accounts can be performed using these processes.

The identity lifecycle management automates process such as user onboarding and identity governance process that are prone to errors and time consuming. For instance, the automation tool starts a workflow when an employee joins the company. The workflow creates a new user account, grants the necessary access and permissions, and triggers an email to the new employee with their login information in addition to other relevant links and handy contact information. Similarly, the automation tool starts a defined workflow when an employee leaves the organization by deactivating their account, revoking their access privileges, logging an incident in the ITSM tool, and alerting the IT department.

In Conclusion:

Identity lifecycle management is a valuable process for an enterprise to maximize the user engagement. The system efficiently manages an identity’s lifespan in an automated way, when someone leaves an organization, the user’s account is immediately terminated, preventing unauthorized access and data breaches, both of which may be an expensive affair for an enterprise.

The goal of Identity lifecycle management is to enhance security, managing compliance, proper hygiene and accurate data in the enterprise identity system while also resulting in a positive and a satisfying user experience and meaningful relationships with the organization.

Good to read reference article : https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/governance/what-is-identity-lifecycle-management

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