People are the weakest link in a company's security. So ensuring that identities are properly managed, from user arrival to departure, is critical.
Managing thousands of accounts and hundreds or thousands of identities can quickly spiral out of control, jeopardizing corporate security and productivity. This is where Identity Lifecycle Management (ILM ) comes in. It helps companies automate the administrative management of tasks.
Identity lifecycle management is an integral part of identity and access management (IAM).
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What is identity lifecycle management?
Identity lifecycle management covers 4 key stages in employee tracking:
- arrivals,
- movements,
- prolonged absences,
- departures
This translates into computer terms as follows:
- account creation,
- modifications,
- suspensions or deactivations,
- account deletions.
This is known as the employee lifespan. The days of the single company are over, and professional experience is multiplying.
Employees expect to be supported by their organization throughout their life cycle.
Stages in a user's life cycle :
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The benefits of identity lifecycle management :
ILM helps IT departments in a number of ways →.
Eliminate manual tasks
- Managing multiple identities and provisioning critical resources, and modifying user attributes can be a major burden for IT departments if carried out manually.
- Creating accounts and roles for each application by hand, ensuring that access levels are correct and revoking rights when they are no longer relevant is a complex and risky task if carried out manually.
- Automation becomes a major asset that will simplify, make reliable and accelerate user lifecycle management processes.
Reduce risk and ensure compliance
Ensuring the right rights for the right person is not only good for user productivity, it's also good for corporate security.
Administrators need to be able to assign the right access according to role, i.e. the status and position the user occupies within the company. As soon as a user's role changes, the administrator must be able to readjust it.
Offboarding is a key period in risk management. When a user leaves the company, deprovisioning must be carried out immediately, so as not to leave accesses open.
In a small company, all these actions are manageable, but on a scale of 500, 1,000 or 5,000+ employees, how can they be managed manually?
It's not just about managing users, it's also about managing accounts and licenses. User lifecycle management involves a number of different stages, all of which are critical for different reasons.
When it comes to onboarding, it's all about providing the right tools immediately.
When you move internally, you need to readjust rights and access, and when you leave, you need to suspend or delete accounts.
What is the risk at the time of departure ?
During a period of time (the time it takes you to suspend an account), the user still has access to his accounts and therefore to his information. Imagine a sales rep who leaves and still has access to the company's sales database, including both old and new prospects...
The other dangerous point is the updates that are no longer applied to this account, where security flaws can appear. It is therefore easy for a hacker to take control of one of these dormant accounts and make it react with the other people in the company. In a company with over 5,000 employees, it's impossible to know whether a particular person no longer works for the company, and therefore whether his or her request is suspicious.
It is therefore crucial to automate identity lifecycle management at the point of departure, in order to revoke a person's rights.
This is particularly important from a regulatory point of view, which requires a strict access rights policy. Account provisioning audits may be required to ensure traceability of actions.
Manage application profiles
For each application, you have defined a basic set of parameters, adapted according to roles. This is complex to manage and maintain. Set-up is done manually, with its share of errors, and then adaptation is laborious. Sometimes, by default, we tend to assign administrator rights as soon as a user has slightly higher requirements. This is a mistake.
Microsoft's Active Directory is very difficult to organize, adjust and track when it comes to role management. And yet, the AD is a central and sensitive point in your information system.
Automation will help you create application profiles and administer them automatically according to each user's role.
Managing shadow IT
Users may tend to test a number of applications before finding the right one, which may then be replaced by another, more modern and efficient application.
The emergence of shadow IT takes place in this context, where account management is not monitored.
Automation makes it possible to centralize applications in order to better manage user needs, and thus to reactively create and delete user accounts. In this way, the IT department is seen not as a hindrance, but as an enabler of productivity.
User and application repository
To manage identity lifecycle management, you need up-to-date user and application repositories. Without this, you'll end up with a gap between HR and IT when it comes to accounts and users.
Both repositories need to be up to date, and the reason I'm bringing up this subject is that keeping them up to date is difficult, because it involves double entry for HR and exchanges of e-mails with IT. We're talking about new arrivals here, and as for departures, they're often non-existent or without a well-defined process.
Automation will enable you to keep your repositories up to date. The identity and access management solution that manages lifecycles will connect to your HRIS and your applications to circulate the information entered by HR.
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What difficulties do companies encounter in managing user lifecycles?
This is because, whether automated or not, the company will at least create accounts for new users and for each new need, because it can't do otherwise. This point is totally blocking if it is not done.
The rest is much more random. There may be a reconciliation of accounts and users a few times a year in conjunction with HR in order to readjust who is there and who is no longer there, and therefore which accounts to delete.
The difficulties don't stop there, there are often processes that are more or less known and applied, but often when another person has to take over the project, it's very difficult because everything is 'tweaked' from the start.
- Processes are not documented, nor are workflows.
- In-house scripts may have been developed by one person, but are globally complex, unmanageable by another person and not adaptable to different situations.
- Account creation deadlines are not met, and users are left waiting for their access.
- In a hurry, administrator rights can be assigned to avoid round-trips.
- Manual account management requires the presence of several IT technicians.
- Offboarding is overdue and jeopardizes company security.
What is the user benefit of a lifecycle management solution in an organization?
To answer this question simply: responsiveness!
We're talking about interest for the company, but there's also interest for the user.
Managing the stages in a user's lifecycle means you can track the development of an employee within the company, and have a true understanding of his or her position at any given moment.
The IT department can respond quickly to immediate needs.
A user joining a company expects to be pampered, and if they're not, they're likely to disengage and leave.
It is therefore in the interests of the IT department, HR and the manager to manage the user experience as effectively as possible, and this is where identity lifecycle management is a great asset, as it enables the right access with the right rights at the right time to be given to the right person.
The other benefit of ILM is that team management for the manager is simplified by an automated process for requesting IT resources.
How can an IAM solution help with lifecycle management?
Identity lifecycle management will be integrated more globally into an IAM solution. Managing identities without managing access makes no sense.
Integration with applications (HRIS, Active Directory, business applications) is a prerequisite for identity automation.
Among the various IAM functionalities, the synchronization of HR and IT information will be the key to success, enabling :
- automate user entry and exit,
- disable access
- revise rights and authorizations
- review accounts
- guarantee access authorization to the right applications
When it comes to security, identity lifecycle management is essential, as it provides information on users who have left the company, enabling IT to delete all the accounts linked to these people.
Similarly, lifecycle management also includes an important part: internal changes within the company. Rights and access evolve, and it must be easy toalign a person'srights. This cannot be done by hand.
Neither IT nor a manager has the competence to judge at a given moment whether a given employee has a level of rights and access in line with his or her current position. One doesn't know what his or her needs are, and the other doesn't know which security groups he or she has and should have. IAM can provide answers to these problems.
IAM will map all of this employee's accounts and will be able to issue neutral information on his or her accesses. IAM will help track the stages in a user's life cycle.
Conclusion
User Lifecycle Management (ILM) is emerging as a crucial element in corporate security and productivity strategies. In the face of increasingly complex IT environments and rapidly evolving careers, automation offers considerable advantages. It not only eliminates time-consuming, error-prone manual tasks, but also significantly reduces security risks, particularly those associated with dormant accounts and unauthorized access.
For users, ILM means an improved experience, with fast, appropriate access to the resources they need from the moment they arrive and throughout their time with the company. For managers and IT teams, it means increased visibility and simplified management of identities and access. By integrating ILM into a global identity and access management (IAM) solution, companies can not only optimize their internal processes, but also reinforce their overall security posture, ensuring regulatory compliance and the protection of sensitive data.
