Productivity & Automation Archives

Save Costs and Boost Security with Automated User Provisioning and Deprovisioning

Provisioning and de-provisioning are critical processes in managing access to data and systems within an organization. Proper provisioning ensures new employees receive the access rights they need to perform their jobs effectively. Conversely, de-provisioning ensures access is promptly revoked when an employee leaves the organization, preventing unauthorized access to sensitive information.

Failing to provision or de-provision users correctly results in several issues.

Delays in provisioning mean users don’t have the access they need, and that’s productive time lost
Users with inappropriate access may inadvertently modify or delete important data, leading to inaccuracies
Former employees with lingering access, after they exit the organization, can pose significant security threats, leading to data breaches
Organizations may face regulatory fines and reputational damage if they fail to manage access controls

Most of these problems are caused by a manual process for provisioning and de-provisioning – here’s why.

Time-Consuming Processes: IT teams spend a significant amount of time creating, managing, and disabling user accounts, which can delay access for new hires and leave security gaps when employees depart. A manual process involves multiple steps and approvals, such as filling out forms, sending emails, waiting for responses, and logging into different systems, which can be tedious, repetitive, and prone to delays or failures, especially when dealing with many users or frequent changes. Automated provisioning reduces this process from days to just minutes.
Human Errors: Manual processes are susceptible to mistakes, such as granting incorrect access rights or failing to revoke access promptly. For example, a user may be granted access to a resource they should not have, or a user may be left with access to a resource that they no longer need. These errors can cause security breaches, compliance issues, operational problems, or data leaks.
Lack of Consistency: Ensuring consistent application of access policies is difficult, leading to potential security vulnerabilities. Provisioning done poorly creates problems with employee onboarding and offboarding, thus straining relationships between departments and adding unnecessary stress across an organization. Governance, risk, security, and compliance teams are frustrated when employees have too much access or access they don’t need or, worse when poor offboarding doesn’t remove access for someone who has left the organization.
Lack of auditability: A manual process may not provide a clear and comprehensive record of who has access to what, when, why, and how. This can make it difficult to monitor, review, and report on user activity and access rights, as well as to detect and respond to any anomalies or incidents. Manual processes may fail to meet regulatory requirements for user provisioning and de-provisioning, such as separation of duties, role-based access control, and identity verification.

A manual provisioning and de-provisioning process brings with it certain direct and indirect costs.

Direct Costs: The time and resources required to manage user accounts manually can add up, diverting IT staff from more strategic tasks.
Indirect Costs: Inconsistent access management can lead to security breaches, regulatory fines, and damage to the organization’s reputation.

That’s why it’s time to make the move to automated user provisioning and de-provisioning.

1. Access control in real-time

Automated systems ensure that new employees have instant access to the necessary resources, enhancing productivity from day one. Automated provisioning sets up access and privileges for each resource in the organization based on the employee’s role and company rules. When an admin adds, edits, or removes a user, the system automatically adjusts the access—turning it on, changing it, or turning it off. Similarly, access can be promptly revoked for departing employees, mitigating security risks.

2. Consistent application of policies

Automation enforces consistent access policies across the organization, reducing the likelihood of errors and ensuring compliance with industry regulations. By automatically giving and taking away access based on set rules, it reduces the chance of unauthorized access. This automatic system eliminates human error, lowering the risk of security breaches.

3. Reduction in administrative overhead

By automating repetitive tasks, IT teams can focus on more strategic initiatives, reducing the overall administrative burden and operational costs.

A study by Aberdeen Group found that effective onboarding can improve new hire productivity by 60% and reduce turnover by 50%. Using automation software and remote support, companies can speed up the onboarding process and help new employees get up to speed faster.

4. Minimizing the Risk of Data Breaches

Automated deprovisioning ensures that former employees no longer have access to sensitive data, significantly lowering the risk of data breaches and unauthorized access. According to a Thales report, human actions can compromise security, with 44% of their survey respondents saying they’ve experienced one. In the past year alone, 14% reported a breach.

So how do you choose the right tool to automate user provisioning and deprovisioning?

Integration capabilities: Ensure the tool integrates with your existing systems and applications. This will reduce the time required to set up infrastructure components, such as virtual machines, databases, and networking resources, accelerating time-to-market for applications and services.
Scalability: As your organization grows, the number of access requests will also increase. So, choose a solution that can grow with your organization and adapt to changing needs.
Ease of Use: Look for tools with intuitive interfaces that simplify the setup and management of user provisioning and de-provisioning. Use automated provisioning software that can handle tasks like assigning IP addresses, configuring DNS, and setting permissions for employees and clients. This helps integrate the entire work infrastructure of an organization with just a click.

Automating user provisioning and de-provisioning is a smart investment for organizations looking to enhance security, reduce costs, and improve efficiency. But you need to implement the right automation tools so your organization can ensure immediate access control, consistent policy application, reduced administrative overhead, and minimized risk of data breaches. Our experts at Akku can help you with that. Reach out to us today.

Boost security, streamline operations: Here’s how IAM can help your ITeS/BPO business

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!

Identifying Training Opportunities and Boosting Productivity with a User Activity Monitoring (UAM) tool

User Activity Monitoring tools (UAMs) have a bad rep, with many employees believing that they are used by employers for the sole purpose of spying on them. While this may actually be true in some cases, there are so many ways that a UAM can be of real value to an organization – for both the management and the employees.

Helping you to identify training opportunities for your employees is among the most important benefits that using a UAM can provide. Gallup found that “hope for career growth opportunities is the number one reason people change jobs today”. By offering training to your top talent, you can upskill them and prepare them for new roles and responsibilities.

Do your employees have the skills they need?

Gartner found that “58% of the workforce will need new skill sets to do their jobs successfully”. However, do you know which employees are up-to-date in their skills, and which ones need upskilling or reskilling?

Similarly, you recruit candidates with the skills and expertise that you require for the organization, but you may request your employee to take on slightly different tasks from time to time.

As a manager, you would ask the employee if they have the skills to take on the task. However, new employees or those being considered for promotion may not be comfortable with replying honestly in the negative.

In such a situation, what does the employee do?

What usually happens in such a situation is that the employee accepts the new responsibility and agrees to deliver within the defined turnaround time. They then log on to Google to find out how to perform the task!

The worst part is that as management, all you know is that your team member is not meeting their commitments. You may think they’re lazy or inefficient. There’s a tendency to put more pressure on them, resulting in unnecessary stress and employee burnout.

Even if you have product management tools where the team logs time spent on different sub-tasks, they’re not likely to log research time. After all, they are trying to hide from management the fact that they lack the required knowledge or skills!

How can you solve this problem?

Use a User Activity Monitoring (UAM) tool to understand how the employees are performing. For instance, Akku’s UAM proxy reads users’ app activity, including which websites they are visiting and how long they’re spending time on sites like Google, Stack Overflow or Stack Exchange.

Akku then shares reports on the relevant data. By studying these reports, you can see which employees are spending an unusual amount of time on Google and other work-oriented research. You then understand that they need more training on specific subjects, and can plan reskilling accordingly.

Using a UAM right

UAMs are often used by managers to snoop on their employees and penalize them for slacking or for time away from their device. As a result, employees try to work around the system to maintain their privacy.

A UAM is not about policing employees’ time – it’s about productivity. User activity monitoring, when it’s done right, is of great benefit to both employee and employer. Prioritize productivity by identifying skilling opportunities and delivering appropriate training content to your employees who need it, when they need it.

Work with Akku to implement UAM and improve organization productivity. Schedule a consultation with us for more information.