5 Ways to Know You Need an IAM Solution

Featured article by Dean Wiech, managing director, Tools4ever

Implementing an identity and access management solution scares many organizations’ IT leaders and their CEOs for a variety of reasons. Though doing so does cost money, the expense of doing so is probably not as much as if saved because of resulting employee efficiencies among other savings factors. Cost and investment are only a small factor to be considered.

Every organization must address password and account management issues. They can be overlooked, of course, and assigned to be managed by IT departments as they arise, but usually in every organization, there is a certain point where the problems created by poor access and identity management procedures interferes with productivity in an overwhelming fashion and begins to cost the organization unneeded time and money. That’s when it becomes a major issue.

So how do you know when it gets to this point and when your organization needs an IAM solution? The following are five ways that you know an IAM solution is needed to improve processes.

An abundance of calls to the helpdesk

Whether it is password or access issues, when your helpdesk is receiving an overload of calls each day, the amount of time spent managing the process and time wasted by employees to re-gain access to their accounts can have a devastating effect on the productivity of the end user. Contacting the helpdesk, staring a new ticket and solving the account and password issue is time consuming and an extreme annoyance when an end user is in the middle of something; especially if they are with a customer at the time they are locked out.

Full-time employee for account management

Many organizations need to hire a full-time employee just to handle provisioning accounts and making account changes. If this is a full-time position at your company it is because you are handling the account management process manually, which is time consuming and prone to error, not to mention, it is very expensive to hire someone to do these manual tasks full time.

Employees don’t have all their accounts created on first day of employment

If you have employees who, on their first day of employment, cannot start working because of lack of access to the systems and applications they need, this is shows an inefficient process. It usually takes up to a week for a new employee to have all the correct access they need, which is a monumental loss of productivity, time and money.

Users are accidentally left active after they are no longer with the organization

Often, when employees leave an organization, disabling their accounts is overlooked and they are left active on the organization’s network. Though this is easy to overlook, it can create a security risk. Once an employee leaves, their access should automatically be disabled so they are no longer able to retrieve anything in the organization’s network.

Each system or application has different employee information

If each of your organization’s systems and applications has different employee information, this can be a difficult environment to manage, especially when trying to keep all data in sync. Each system needs to have the most current and correct employee information. When an employee gets married and changes their last name, for example, changing this information in each system can take a great deal of time and easily be overlooked.

Are any of these happening at your organization? If your organization deals with one or more of these issues, you may benefit from an IAM solution. So, even though implementing the solution can be scary, the process is actually a lot easier than dealing with issues that are already occurring on a daily basis, and can save your organization time in the long run.

Dean Wiech is managing director of Tools4ever, a global provider of identity and access management solutions.