Identity lifecycle management

Ronak D Jain

Mar 245 min read

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Table of Content

Read more
  • 5 pain points you can overcome in AD user account management  
    Manual vs. automated identity life cycle management  
    Active Directory clean-up: Should you automate it?  
  • Maintain confidentiality of critical information by implementing the POLP  
    6 essential capabilities of a modern UBA solution  
    How can SSO help in reinforcing password security?  
  • Authentication vs. authorization  
    5 simple steps to HIPAA compliance  
    Smart strategies to provision and de-provision Active Directory  

Eliminate manual processes, empower your users, and ensure round-the-clock security with our enterprise-ready identity lifecycle management solution.

Humans are the weakest link of an organization's security. Therefore, ensuring that user identities are properly created, modified, and disabled, right from the moment an employee is on-boarded to the moment they leave the company is critical.

However, managing thousands of digital user identities can quickly get out of hand and can compromise the security and productivity of an organization. This is where identity and lifecycle management can help. It can enable organizations to manage user accounts effectively, ensure consistent experience, and automate administrative IT tasks..

Identity lifecycle management (ILM) is the full life cycle of identity and access for any user in the network. It covers every aspect of identity and access management (IAM) from the moment a person is on-boarded to the moment they leave the company.

Eliminate manual tasks with smart automation

Managing multiple users’ identities, provisioning access to critical resources, and modifying other user attributes can introduce a significant burden on IT staff, if done manually. Creating accounts and roles manually for each employee to multiple applications, ensuring those employees have an appropriate level of access within each application, and revoking access when employees leave or devices are lost —can easily overwhelm helpdesk managers or IT admins.

The ability to automate such manual and repetitive tasks will free up a lot of time, thereby letting the IT team concentrate on the more important tasks. Automating repetitive tasks also means that the chances of human error diminishes to zero. This reduces security risks from erroneous user management, and any loss in productivity from insufficient access permissions.

How AD360's controlled automation helps:

With AD360, organizations can automate routine management tasks such as user provisioning and AD cleanup, and reduce the workload of IT administrators and help desk technicians. Automatic approval workflows can also be configured so that administrators can focus on more critical tasks.

Reduce regulatory risk and ensure compliance

Ensuring the right level of access to various users is not only essential for user productivity, but it’s also important from a security perspective. Administrators should be able to provision users with the right access based on role, and instantly change that access as employees’ roles change.

When a user leaves a company, IT teams need to deprovision the user from all the systems the user has access to within a short period. This reduces the organization's exposure to risk from that employee. The picture becomes even more complicated when enterprises must solve the lifecycle management of not just the user and their apps, but also of their software licenses.

Identity management during the off-boarding process is also critical, and the ability to automatically revoke, suspend, or disable accounts across all apps is vital to prove regulatory compliance with standards like HIPAA, PCI-DSS, GDPR, and more.

How AD360's user provisioning helps:

Organizations can easily provision, modify, and deprovision accounts and mailboxes for multiple users at once across AD, Exchange servers, Office 365 services, and G Suite from the single AD360 console. Customizable user creation templates can be used to import data from CSV to bulk provision user accounts. AD360 also enables organizations to securely manage users’ identities, control access to critical resources, audit changes, empower users with self-service, and more. AD360's different components can be integrated together based on specific organizational requirements.

Break down operational silos

Managing user identities often comes with its share of difficulty — the complexity of managing identity silos within applications and environments. Maintaining and managing these accounts, licenses, permissions, and resources are often a highly manual and daunting task for IT. Working in silos does not help the cause.

How AD360's all-round user management helps:

AD360 simplifies user provisioning and AD administration with complete security and authentication to allow only authorized users to perform management actions. This AD management tool allows administrators and AD managers to manage AD users, computers, contacts, groups, and more, efficiently. It also makes it possible to provision users in Exchange, Office 365, G Suite and also generate reports for all the domains, or an AD environment from a central location.

Integrate across functions

Every organization, during its life, deploys multiple IT applications to meet various IT needs. These applications often operate in silos, catering to specific requirements. Over a period, admins will find it difficult to perform IT management tasks.

Organizations often rely on a human resources management system (HRMS) as the authoritative source of employee data. However, for IT admins, synchronizing user data between their organization's HRMS and Active Directory remains a challenge. As more and more employees join the organization, change their roles over time or leave, IT admins are left dealing with constant requests to update all these changes in Active Directory. There is a definite gap between IT and HR when it comes to user onboarding and off-boarding. It costs organizations unnecessary manpower and reduces the productivity of IT admins, HR managers, and employees. For holistic IT management, it is prudent to integrate some of the critical applications so that IT management can be done from a single tool.

How AD360's integration helps:

Integration with help desk applications

AD360's integration with help desk tools helps AD administrators and technicians carry out AD management actions without using multiple tools. AD360 currently integrates with ServiceDesk Plus, Zendesk, and ServiceNow. Thanks to these integrations, help desk technicians can simultaneously provision user accounts in AD, Office 365, G Suite, Exchange, and Skype for Business using templates; reset AD users' passwords; and perform a variety of management actions all without leaving their help desk console.

Integration with human resource management systems

Organizations rely on HRMS to manage employee details. Integration with popular HR tools such as Zoho People, Ultipro, BambooHR and Workday makes AD account management easy for administrators and HR managers alike, with complete hands-free user provisioning, management, and de-provisioning.

By integrating AD360 with HRMS Applications, administrators can:

  • Search for a user record added or modified in the HRMS and accordingly provision or modify that user account in AD.
  • Delete users in AD, along with their Exchange mailboxes, Office 365 accounts, and more.