Dependable Automation for Identity + Access Management
Automation for Identity and Access Management
Whether you are new to automation or working towards continuous improvement, Flycast Partners has experience helping organizations identify automation opportunities, develop integration roadmaps, and integrate automation with identity and access management as well as service management solutions.
CLICK HERE to listen to our companion Podcast about Automation for Identity and Access Management.
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A Dependable Plan for Identity And Access Management Using Automation
As remote work becomes a long-term or hybrid strategy, organizations need to consider more self-service and automation capabilities to help employees remain productive without physical access to devices. Automation provides audit capabilities to understand the who, what, when, where, and why for entitlements to resources. Automation workflows execute the process steps that occur for provisioning or de-provisioning entitlements, providing documentation, consistency, and standardization. With standardized procedures and clear policies, organizations can address the concerns of managing a remote workforce, ensuring data remains uncompromised and remote employees have secure access to the right tools and applications at the right time for the right reason to remain productive. By effectively integrating automated processes with identity management systems, organizations possess the capabilities to drill down and understand instantly who in your remote workforce has access to what resources.
Where to Find Automation Opportunities
Flycast Partners has an organized and focused methodology to identify the areas where automation can create an immediate impact. Prior to implementation, an organization must recognize the most effective areas for automation opportunities and build a strategic roadmap. From an operational perspective, the 80/20 rule is a clear strategy, allowing an organization to automate 80% of the day-one provisioning needs of an employee while setting aside 20% for additional, unique provisioning requests or wants relevant to each organization. Keep in mind this takes time and is typically not executed as a single project, the goal is to identify the opportunities and determine what will have the most operational impact on the business. To ensure an organization integrates automation effectively with its identity management systems, there must be a thorough review and audit of internal data prior to synchronization of company data. A common phrase is “Garbage in, garbage out”, bad data will have a bad impact during synchronization, you will just get there fast with automation. How ready is your organization to adopt automation both technically and culturally? What does the majority of your workforce require to be productive on day one? What automation will have the largest impact on the business?
Why Identity Governance Is Important?
Completing a comprehensive internal analysis shows where automation can replace legacy systems and manual touchpoints. During this initial phase, Flycast Partners interviews many different stakeholders and helps identify where automation can improve an organization according to its strategic roadmap. In addition, we examine data cleanliness and data accuracy, execute desk and process audits while communicating with department heads regarding improvement opportunities. Flycast Partners reviews operational data, environments, distribution lists, security groups, and control directories, and based on upfront analysis, we can help determine the relevant areas where identity and automation align with long- and short-term objectives. The key to honing best practices comes during this initial phase. From infrastructure systems to downstream applications, we assist in establishing accurate processes and analyzing the unnecessary touchpoints, requests, and reviews in order to remove redundancy and increase standardization. Through these evaluations, Flycast Partners can build an automation plan and ensure a smooth transition so your organization can achieve and maintain identity governance.
Why Data Integrations Are Important?
Once business systems have been identified, the next step is understanding data integration capabilities. Most solutions will typically have integrations with other vendors pre-built for seamless integration and ease of implementation. Can we perform the required changes in the business system(s)? Do the business systems provide a way to programmatically make the required changes? In cases where pre-built integration does not exist or has all of the required capabilities, our team can review the application and build custom data integrations to ensure the needs of the business are met.
Audit and Compliance Visibility
Despite all the different integrations and tools, audit and compliance visibility can be addressed efficiently and effectively. Most large organizations already have an internal auditing footprint, and their role is to execute continual, ongoing audits within the organization. From an IT perspective, audits identify the reasons how access was requested, approved, provided, and revoked. This audit typically occurs in the ticketing system to tell us who, what, when, where, and why the access was provided. By removing manual touchpoints and implementing automated processes effectively, access is being provided with contextual rules and can be audited instantaneously. For many organizations, Flycast Partners has provided auditors read-only access to historical logs without Human Resources and Information Technology teams providing reports to answer audit questions. Auditing automated processes provide an organization an improved level of visibility that can be reviewed in the product or rolled up to centralized security systems. Providing these capabilities, auditing will be more straightforward forward with reviews taking minutes versus days.
Reliable and Accurate Information with Identity and Access Management
With organizations enabling remote workforces, they can implement reliable and accurate identity management systems to strategically align operations for automation initiatives. Ensure employees have secure access to the right resources throughout their entire employee lifecycle. When promoted, demoted, leave of absence, moves, anything related to lifecycle management, the employee will continue to have updated access. Using data-driven automation to execute the heavy lifting, immediate changes to access can be executed seamlessly with little to no manual intervention. By implementing identity and automation, organizations increase automation maturity, audit success and provide the most valuable commodity back to everyone, time.
