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Opportunity
While improvised or manually provisioning users was once a way to ensure that each received the proper rights and access, the sheer speed in the increase in users and updates, along with the diversity of users, requires sophisticated and comprehensive provisioning tools. This same volume of activity makes the documentation required by internal and external auditors virtually impossible without robust and repeatable processes and capabilities.
The IT department has the opportunity to address growing administrative costs by streamlining, automating and documenting the user provisioning process while making sure that group and individual rights are kept current and accurate, enabling all users to better perform their jobs.
Benefits
Using provisioning tools with dynamic, scalable capabilities and flexible functionality creates several tangible benefits to the IT department and the organization in general. By utilizing user self-service options, fine-grained entitlement functions and supporting diverse platforms, IT managers can reduce costs, improve service, better manage risk, and meet the business needs of the enterprise through integration with other software and applications.
A successful security management strategy helps ensure continuous business operations by minimizing risk at virtually every level of the organization. Because IT budgets are always tight, a successful security management system also can help IT stay within budgetary constraints and increase operational efficiencies.
Provisioning Challenges for Today’s IT Departments
As technology continues to fuel growth in organizations of all shapes and sizes, even the most dedicated and talented IT teams face challenges from the population explosion among their user communities. More users require more access to more applications than ever before. In the past, adding new employees and updating passwords were considered time consuming tasks, but not particularly mission critical to the entire organization. However, the changing dynamics of the mobile, global economy, and increased scrutiny by internal and external auditors, have dramatically increased the challenges facing today’s IT department in the area of user provisioning.
Today, IT managers face a myriad of challenges to creating and maintaining user identities, including:
- An employee base that can grow or shrink virtually overnight
- Employees who are constantly changing functions, or working cross-functionally within the organization
- Temporary contracted and outsourced employees
- Vendors and partners who need access to your applications
- Customers who need access to your products and services
- Compliance with internal corporate policy and external regulations
The Dynamic Workforce
The size, shape and makeup of an organization’s workforce have never been more dynamic. From a macroeconomic perspective, factors such as globalization, the growth of outsourcing, the continued shift to knowledge-based employment, and even population fluctuations and the aging workforce affect the potential makeup of an organization’s user population.
On a more micro level, the reality of workforce migration is playing a significant role in reshaping the workforce in most industries. The addition or departure of users on a regular basis is clear evidence that organizations no longer remain one size for extended periods of time. Mergers and acquisitions, layoffs and shutdowns, outsourced job functions and entire divisions moving overseas, all mean that there can be significant changes to many users in a very short period of time.
Where once it theoretically was possible to plan for new employees to be added on the first Monday of the month (or terminated on the last), that predictability has been replaced by a need to have a large group of new employees in the Beijing office online by next Thursday. Without powerful provisioning tools this need would become a major obstacle to productivity.
The Challenge Within: Employee Movement and Promotions
Now that we have established that the employee base is constantly in flux, we need to address another challenge: the changing nature of the individual employee. Modern employees change job functions within an organization significantly more than they have in the past. As organizations strive to reduce turnover rates and keep employees from job-hopping, one of the benefits most are touting is mobility within the organization.
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