Identity Lifecycle Management

The Dangers of Poor Identity Lifecycle Management 

Onboarding and managing all users efficiently is one of the most notable challenges in lifecycle management, but it's not the most high-risk. While inefficient onboarding and managing can disrupt workflows and waste resources, your organization also needs to consider the following risks:

• Privilege creep: Users change positions often, and with a new position comes new access requirements. Poor identity lifecycle management may lead to the accumulation of access privileges that a user doesn't need for their current role. This scenario causes a security risk in two ways — the user can use their excess privileges inappropriately, and an intruder who gets into the account will have expanded access to your organization's resources. 
• External users: Most companies must manage temporary users to a degree, from seasonal workers to contractors. These individuals need access to internal resources, but they also need to be offboarded as soon as the work is complete. Unchecked user identity management can lead to security risks from external users who are not long-term contributors to your organization.
• Insecure offboarding: Offboarding is an essential process in lifecycle management. A user who leaves a company needs to lose complete access to internal resources to prevent security risks. If these identities are not offboarded effectively, the access attached to them often goes unmonitored, creating orphaned and dormant accounts which equals space for intruders to hack into your system and potentially go undetected.

5 Reasons to Invest in Lifecycle Management Software 

Investing in a trusted ILM tool can deliver numerous benefits to your organization. With lifecycle management software, you can:

Introduce End-to-End Visibility

Modern businesses rely on increasingly complex IT environments, especially as more users join from on-premises and remote desktops. An ILM tool provides complete visibility to every resource and those with access to keep administrators informed about every aspect of the environment. 

Increase Efficiency

With automation capabilities and greater visibility, your IT team can manage every process more efficiently, from onboarding to offboarding. Streamlining this process protects your IT administrators from overextension and improves the workflow of everyone in your organization. 

Enhance Security

When you have a defined process for onboarding, managing and offboarding users, you can prevent external users from stealing your data, stop privilege creep and ensure every user identity is secure.