What is Identity life cycle management?
Identity life cycle management (ILM) involves managing the digital identities of users and their evolving access to essential information across their entire life cycle. It includes account provisioning, account maintenance, access reviews and monitoring, and deprovisioning. It is crucial to have a robust identity life cycle management process to facilitate productivity and high levels of security. ILM processes encompass employees, customers, contractors, and vendors and their access to cloud and on-premises applications.
Manual vs. automated identity life cycle management
IT admins can manage users' digital identities manually in startup environments. However, in mid-size and large organizations, managing thousands of digital identities manually is extremely complex. Organizations should have a powerful identity life cycle management tool in place to automate their ILM components.
There are numerous scenarios where automation is more effective than manual identity life cycle management. Listed below are a few use cases.
User onboarding
When new users are onboarded, the hiring manager generally sends the employee details to the IT team. The IT team then creates the corresponding account in the corporate directory, payroll, granting access to applications and folders, and other tasks.
If performed manually, this process is error-prone and time-consuming. Automating the user onboarding process ensures that the new hires have all the access that they need in their role from day one.
User offboarding
When employees exit an organization, their user accounts must be disabled and deleted. Additionally, their licenses and access to cloud applications must be revoked. It is crucial that admins perform these operations as inactive user accounts tend to pose huge security threats. When user deprovisioning is automated, a set of operations will be executed automatically each time an employee leaves the organization. Automating user offboarding will clean up the AD environment, resulting in improved server and database performance.
Update records in AD when changes are made in HRMS
As the business expands, organizations might begin to use multiple IT applications, many of which are business-specific, and they might operate in silos. As far as identity life cycle is concerned, human resource management systems (HRMS) applications are used to store and manage employee data. As new employees are onboarded or when users change roles, IT admins have to synchronize user data between their HRMS applications and AD. When the ILM solution is integrated with HRMS, the entire process covering user provisioning, management, and deprovisioning can be automated, thereby increasing the productivity of admins.
Automating different elements of identity life cycle management significantly reduces the monotonous workload of IT admins. ManageEngine AD360, an identity life cycle management software, helps you streamline end-to-end identity management. Some powerful capabilities of AD360 are automated objects management across AD, Exchange Server, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, seamless integration with popular HR tools, business workflows for controlled automation, and more.
You can explore AD360 on your own by test-driving a free, 60-day trial version. No strings attached!