This month in our recent articles about Identity and Access Management (IAM), we have talked about some of the benefits of IAM, including increased security for your employees and your organization overall. We have also talked about increased efficiency with onboarding and offboarding.
So, what does something closely associated with HR have to do with a practice often touted by cybersecurity companies? Well, there are a couple side benefits stemming from proper IAM practices that may surprise you.
IAM and Onboarding
Identity and Access Management can help speed up the onboarding process for new hires and ensure that employees gain access to everything they need faster. This is a huge benefit for organizations for a number of reasons.
Proper IAM practices make sure that access to secure systems is conditional to an individual’s role, rather than to the individual. This assists your IT department by simplifying the authorization process by greenlighting access to everything an individual in a particular role may need from day one.
Employees in each specified role to get access to the systems they need in a few hours or faster, unlike outdated practices that result in a delay of access to important systems until days or weeks later.
The implementation of IAM practices helps employees:
- become productive to an organization more rapidly
- get the employee comfortable sooner by quickly moving them past the “new job limbo”
- enjoy job satisfaction more quickly
All of these benefits sound great, right? Well, onboarding is only half of the equation. Offboarding processes also benefit from the efficiencies of IAM.
IAM and Offboarding
When an employee is let go, or quits an organization, it is imperative to terminate their access as soon as it is relevant to do so. With proper Identity and Access Management practices in place, IT departments will know what employees have had access to, and should be able to remove their authorization quickly, reducing the risk for insider threats, and creating a smooth transitional period for the outgoing employee.
There are a number of ways to facilitate this process, including using single-sign on (SSO) where each employee has access to every website and application through a third party that requires only one user name and password. When the employee is being offboarded, there is only one set of credentials to worry about, so you’re not having to revoke access on a number of different platforms.
Finding ways to increase efficiency in offboarding processes will only grow in importance as trends change within the workforce.
More than 40% of millennials plan to leave a job within two years, and less than a third will be around after five years according to the 2018 Deloitte Millennial Survey. Generation Z, a group born in the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s that is now entering the workforce, has a 60% chance of leaving a workforce within two years. Only 12% plan to stay at any one job beyond five years, the survey reported.
You don’t have to run yourself through the wringer every time you need to offboard another employee. Identity and Access Management is the key to true efficiency with onboarding and offboarding for your organization.
So, while you’re making your organization more secure with Identity and Access Management by limiting who can access certain systems according to who needs said access, IAM can be a huge benefit to your HR Department as well.
If you are interested in learning how IAM can increase efficiencies for your onboarding and offboarding processes, and increase security for your organization, fill out the form below to connect with one of our IAM experts.