Ines Guerra
6 min read
We have recently talked on the blog about companies' main problems. Cybersecurity and what practices to follow so that our company is not so exposed to these cyberattacks is something that all companies and startups want to achieve.
One of the most significant benefits that technology gives us is how to automate and eradicate manual processes to eliminate human errors, which are often difficult to detect and stop.
Increase safety because an automated process will minimize the mistakes made.
Reduce manual work, which is costly and slow, and more vulnerable.
These three benefits are just the beginning of what companies need. Companies also need to protect customers' data, sensitive resources, confidential information, and external cyber-attacks.
One of the biggest challenges for the IT department is manually managing all user accounts, group memberships, onboarding processes, etc, creating new accounts, granting and revoking permissions, and tracking resource usage. Not to mention updating records when employees change position, location, or designation due to a project change or promotion. But this task is often not accessible due to team restructuring or time constraints. Directories and updates can be lost, which will lead to a potential security breach. All these tasks, creating new accounts, and assigning the appropriate permissions can be time-consuming, cumbersome, and even confusing for IT staff, especially when the volume of data is high and the number of employees grows. A time-consuming process can leave employees unproductive if there is a delay.
To make the process of provisioning and de-provisioning users more agile, companies need an automatic user provisioning tool. The best user provisioning tools:
-Help companies eliminate difficulties.
-Streamline the management of user accounts and permissions.
With a permissions automation tool, employee credentials, existing user sessions, and connected applications of employees who have left the company are automatically deactivated without IT staff involvement and avoid the risks that manual processes present.
Before we move on, let's spend a few minutes figuring out
User provisioning grants privileges and permissions to users or groups based on their roles. This process involves creating, modifying, and deleting user accounts and permissions. These identity management actions occur regularly within a company every time there is a change or movement within the company. In turn, user deprovisioning is the opposite process, when a user or group's privileges and access rights are limited to ensure that they no longer have access to company resources.
One of the main attractions of user provisioning tools is the multiple benefits that the best user provisioning apps offer:
A new employee joins the company; the user provisioning tool will assign him an email account, username, and home directory and grant him permissions based on his role and entitlement rules. Even when the employee is promoted to a new position in the organization, the automated user provisioning tool will update their directory account details, granting individual access permissions and creating additional accounts to meet compliance requirements.
The automated user provisioning tool should handle ad hoc requests. The self-service solution should allow users and their managers to request additional resources. The access request is then routed to the appropriate department, and the department can approve or deny access according to the entitlement rule.
Some companies don't understand why they need a user provisioning tool or even believe they don't need one. In the absence of an effective user provisioning tool, the administrator can lose productivity by spending endless hours fixing permissions issues. With a user-provisioning tool, mishaps related to unauthorized access, internal breaches, loss of security, delays, etc., can be avoided. This, in turn, allows administrators to improve productivity and time spent troubleshooting.
Keeping data and resources safe is one of the biggest challenges for all organizations today because they all face internal and external threats. If an external user has access to a privileged account, they can compromise sensitive information, delete accounts, use a resource for malicious purposes, etc. The best user provisioning tools help ensure that users can only access the parts of the system they need to do their job.
In our last webinar on cybersecurity (we leave you the link here), Marta, one of the speakers, a cybersecurity specialist, cited that "another concern I would say is automation. We have so many types of attacks, so many threats, so many problems in our daily life that we can't handle them all, so we have to start automating, we have to delegate some things, and in terms of reducing vulnerabilities or preventing them, preventing the exposures that we have once we move our business to the cloud, I think. I don't want to repeat myself, but we have to automate security in the cloud, especially around the recovery of implementation monitoring and eliminating manual processes because we lack specialists. We have to make them work on essential things."
All of the above concerns are reflected here, and we can see how a permissions automation tool would solve most of these problems.
To choose the best user provisioning software, you must ensure that it is easy to use, offers a good user experience, comprehensive, and reduces overhead. The tool should work quickly to enable and disable accounts automatically, enable self-service, delegate access requests, and track data access.
Before implementing the user provisioning tool, the tool's scope should be known.
It is advisable to implement the tool little by little, test it, give the expected results. If the result is satisfactory, it will be time to implement it throughout the organization.
Every SaaS startup has a product or service that will be used in different ways by different customers, which requires different user roles. Roles are directly related to SaaS user management, and permissions management is critical for many applications. At MyLenio, we know how important it is to have control, which users will perform which actions, and how to implement application user management best practices in your company.
Making user management more accessible, streamlining onboarding processes, strengthening your company's internal security, and improving your company's productivity are at your fingertips. Enter MyLenio and discover how to simplify your company's day-to-day.
