In the ITeS and BPO industry, striking the right balance between productivity and security can mean the difference between success and failure. Security breaches can have serious financial and reputational consequences, but at the same time an excessive tilt to security at the cost of efficiency can hurt competitiveness.
Let’s dive a little deeper into the key challenges that most ITeS and BPO businesses face, which find solutions in identity an access management.
High employee turnover
The BPO industry is known for its high employee turnover (some reports peg it as high as 40%). This means a continuous cycle of provisioning, de-provisioning, and updating access for constantly changing staff – a logistical nightmare for your IT admin team, and a high risk for unauthorized access.
Remote work
The pandemic may be behind us, but remote work remains 3-4x as prevalent as it was in 2019. Ensuring secure access is a major challenge this presents because the office firewall just doesn’t cut it anymore. At the same time, applying excessive restrictions across the board often stifles productivity.
Data sensitivity
At most ITeS and BPO companies, there are significant volumes of sensitive client data to be managed. Unauthorized access to this data is a major can result in major erosion of client trust and loss of business.
Complex access needs
Employees often need access to multiple systems and applications, each with different access requirements. Improper manual management of these access rights can lead to errors and security gaps.
Here’s how IAM solves each of these problems.
Automated provisioning and deprovisioning
Advanced IAM systems such as Akku help you automate the process of provisioning, de-provisioning, and updation of user access permissions. When employees join or leave, their access rights are automatically updated, reducing the risk of unauthorized access and ensuring compliance.
This means significant amounts of time saved when new employees join your organization or change roles, with the required access permissions assigned with a single click. And when an employee leaves the company, your administrators no longer need to delete the user from each of your applications separately. With one-click deprovisioning, you save time and ensure no access permissions are accidentally left active which could leave the door open to security risks.
Single Sign-On (SSO)
SSO allows employees to access multiple applications with a single set of credentials. This improves their user experience and efficiency, and also enhances security by reducing the number of credentials that your users need to manage, which could potentially become compromised.
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
MFA adds an extra layer of security on top of your password. This is even more important in remote or hybrid operations where you have no way of verifying that the person logging in with a set of credentials is actually a genuine user. MFA goes a long way toward securing your organization’s sensitive data from fraudulent login attempts with stolen user credentials.
Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)
A comprehensive IAM solution like Akku enables you to enforce role-based access control, ensuring that employees only have access to the information necessary for their roles. RBAC allows you to control what end-users can access by assigning them to roles such as administrator, team lead, executive, or business analyst, for example. Permissions can then be aligned with these roles ensuring job functions can be performed without providing excessive or universal access which opens up security risks.
Secure remote access
When it comes to remote operations, ensuring secure access practices is vital to protect sensitive data and applications. An IAM solution like Akku addresses this in multiple ways.
For example, you can set up an IP-based access restriction to allow access to certain sensitive data only from the office to prevent misuse and ensure security. All other functions can be performed remotely to promote productivity and convenience.
Or access to certain resources can be limited to only whitelisted devices using device-based restriction.
Each user can be limited to access resources relevant to them only during their defined work shift and access can be prevented at other times through time-based restrictions.
And access can even be disabled from other countries to prevent malicious activity originating outside your area of operations through location-based restriction.
Partnering with a service provider such as Akku, which has tailored IAM solutions for the BPO and ITeS industry can help you protect sensitive data and maintain compliance with industry regulations besides enabling streamlined operations and collaboration across departments. Contact Akku today to learn more!