Understanding the concept of Identity lifecycle management is critical for IT and security teams to effectively manage employee identities and access privileges throughout an individual’s tenure.
As individuals join the organization, change departments, get promoted or leave, their access privileges must be updated and sometimes DE provisioned.
Automated processes streamline the user lifecycle and eliminate human error that could lead to data breaches, policy violations or downtime.
Registration
Creating a new account is common, whether enrolling in a school or attending a conference. Identity lifecycle management automates this process and enables businesses to grant, modify and revoke access as an employee or contractor moves through their life cycle.
Authentication involves proving that a person has the correct credentials and attributes to access benefits and services. This can be done by using a username and PIN, a card or ID, or a combination of these factors.
An effective Identity lifecycle management solution uses automated policies to establish valuable controls and ensure compliance with internal and external regulations.
This approach helps companies secure their data while freeing IT departments to work on more impactful projects promoting innovation and growth.
Identifying and controlling machine identities on endpoints, servers and applications that use services to authenticate is also an important part of a complete identity lifecycle management solution.
These machine identities can be vulnerable to identity theft, data breaches and policy violations if they are not properly controlled and aligned with policies governing access.
Deprovisioning
Deprovisioning is the process of removing user access to systems, files, networks and apps. It’s often necessary when employees or other parties change roles or leave an organization.
This helps prevent data leaks, security breaches or theft of important information. Managing individual profiles, account privileges, and group memberships can take up a lot of time.
Moreover, IT teams can get busy with other projects that may slow down the provisioning or de-provisioning of access rights.
To avoid this, identity lifecycle management tools automate provisioning and de-provisioning across various IT resources such as servers, databases, applications and more. This frees up disk space, licenses, and physical hardware to support new users.
When an employee leaves, removing their account from the company directory and all other systems they used to access is critical. Failing to do so can result in “zombie accounts” and data leaks.
Credential Issuance
Identity lifecycle management identifies and grants access to people, devices, resources and services.
It involves establishing an individual’s identity, capturing their biometric data and verifying the user through external background checks or other authentication methods before issuing credentials.
Credential issuance may occur immediately after registration (such as a user name, ID number or PKI-enabled SIM card) or later, depending on the organization’s needs and security policies.
Some issuance processes occur within the same system as registration, while others require a separate process of personalization, storage and distribution.
Whether the issuance is live or on paper, it is crucial to have an audit trail throughout the process to track when and where an individual gained access.
This enables organizations to apply the principle of least privilege or restrict users and machines to levels of access that they need, for which they have been granted permission. This enables productivity and helps to protect sensitive information from unauthorized access, use or destruction.
Authentication
Authentication is the process of proving that an individual is who they claim to be by using confidential information that they know (knowledge factors) or a unique object they have which confirms their identity (possession factors).
This authentication method protects personal, business and government resources from unauthorized access.
Typical authentication methods include username and password, biometric information, OTP, and phone/text confirmations. Authentication is vital to Identity lifecycle management because it allows organizations to control user access and privileges through unified policies.
The Identity lifecycle encompasses all aspects of user accounts and the related privileges associated with them from onboarding to departure, as well as provisioning, updating or removing access when it’s no longer needed. It’s an essential part of enabling the efficient and effective use of enterprise applications, systems, data, and networks.
The mix of human and non-human identities is increasingly complex as employees, contractors, and third parties are given access to various systems, including cloud ERP and CRM systems, connected project management tools, and email services. This creates a challenge to manage and track all the identities that need to be provisioned and provisioned when the time comes.
Access Management
The concept of Identity lifecycle management revolves around how users are granted access to the digital resources that an organization provides. This includes the tools, data, and apps employees use to perform their jobs.
Organizations can automate this process using Identity lifecycle management to improve employee productivity and increase enterprise IT security. This also reduces the number of errors that can occur with manual processes.
This process focuses on granting authorized users the right to access services and applications while preventing non-authorized users from using those services. It executes policies that are defined in Information Security Management.
Human and machine identities should be governed by the principle of least privilege, meaning they’re only given access at levels required to do their job or specific tasks. Single sign-on and multi-factor authentication are typically used for this purpose. Still, role-based access controls also help ensure that users can carry out their jobs securely.
