Identity lifecycle management (ILM) manages users’ digital identities from onboarding to departure. It includes creating, updating, and deleting digital identities as required.
In today’s enterprise, it is critical that an individual’s digital identity is created correctly and managed to ensure access to company resources. This can be done by incorporating ILM as part of your security strategy.
Improved Security
Identity lifecycle management is a process that focuses on the creation, maintenance, and removal of digital identities. These identities are used to access company resources and systems.
ILM helps organizations track and adapt the digital identities of employees, contractors, partners, and customers as they interact with the organization. It also helps companies control and mitigate risk and security breaches.
A digital identity is a person’s or group’s name, identifiers, and other properties that help a system determine who can access specific computing resources. This can include operating systems, applications, and devices. As access rights might change throughout time, identity lifecycle management covers every stage of the employee’s career, such as name changes, brief maternity absences, leaving and returning to the company, and more.”
As an organization grows and evolves, the number of digital identities it manages increases. This can create a complex and time-consuming task for IT and security teams.
Organizations must continuously update and re-proof their identity data and credentials to ensure users have the proper access privileges. This includes changes to name, address, marital status, profession, facial image, and other identifying information.
Additionally, it’s essential to update and revoke privileges when necessary. This can include removing privileged accounts or limiting access to certain areas of an organization.
An effective identity lifecycle management solution can significantly reduce your company’s exposure to security threats and unauthorized access. It can also help your team focus on higher-level tasks that drive innovation and growth.
Increased Productivity
Identity lifecycle management solutions ensure people can access the right resources at the right time. This includes employees, partners, customers, and applications, all governed by policy and must be updated as their relationships with your company change.
In a digital world where work happens on multiple devices, organizations are constantly tasked with finding new ways to manage user identities and permissions. They want to ensure employees have the necessary tools and access rights to perform their jobs while keeping security high.
When a person joins the organization, their privileges must be raised; when they get promoted or become a vendor, they must have a different profile; when they resign or leave, their access must be revoked immediately. All of these changes in identity need to be managed efficiently.
Fortunately, Identity Lifecycle Management (ILM) solutions can automate and streamline these processes, ensuring users have the necessary rights at the correct times while maintaining security standards.
ILM solutions provide automated tools for onboarding and offboarding new employees, managing access privileges throughout their careers, and updating their accounts with personal information. They also provide centralized monitoring and reporting capabilities that help corporate IT and security teams track user access activity, investigate security incidents, and support compliance audits.
Reduced Redundancy
Often, organizations have an abundance of identities stored in various systems. This can make it challenging to track who is in the organization and what they have access to.
Identity lifecycle management solutions help manage this complexity. They ensure that all users have access to the right apps, data, and processes at all times and help revoke access when necessary.
Many of these solutions connect to HR systems s and directory services. They allow users to request access rights and update account information without the intervention of help desk employees, saving on call volume and support costs.
They also provide tools to automate approval workflows and centralized monitoring and reporting capabilities, allowing corporate IT and security teams to investigate security incidents, compliance audits, and other activities.
In short, identity lifecycle management solutions are necessary for any organization with many user identities and access privileges to different systems. These identities include human employees, contractors, third parties, and non-human identities.
The need for complete lifecycle management increases as organizations become more distributed and have a larger pool of human, machine, and things (IoT) identities. Using an identity lifecycle management solution that automates all aspects of the process, from account creation to deprovisioning and archiving, will save companies time and money, strengthen security, and boost productivity.
Increased Efficiency
Identity lifecycle management, or ILM, automates processes for a user’s entire identity and access history. This includes onboarding and offboarding, managing and adjusting access privileges, and ensuring the proper expiration of credentials.
The manual process of assigning access privileges requires a lot of work for IT and security departments. Additionally, offboarding must be streamlined when employees or contractors leave the company so they can no longer access sensitive information.
As a result, many companies still need to improve their processes which take days or weeks to complete. Inefficient processes are not only time-consuming but also prone to errors.
Furthermore, approving and provisioning new users and their access privileges can take hours or even days. This can cause an impediment to productivity as employees must wait for approvals to be completed before they can use the resources they need.
A streamlined identity lifecycle management system eliminates these inefficiencies, reducing costs and freeing resources for more critical tasks. This can be accomplished by enabling employees to self-service account updates and implementing tools that help automate approval workflows.
This helps increase efficiency while avoiding costly errors and ensuring data security by limiting access privileges to those necessary for business operations. In addition, a streamlined identity lifecycle management system allows users to easily and quickly revoke access as needed to keep sensitive data secure.