4 Min read
Which IT Nuisance Would You Automate First?
Employee onboarding is one of the heaviest, most complex operations on a company’s IT. This is especially true in fast-growing companies that may see multiple onboardings per day. And, of course, the wider a company’s software tools array, the more accounts to create and permissions to manage.
In a recent Pulse survey, 65% of technology leaders name IT Automation as their #1 priority transformation. Furthermore, HR processes (onboarding, role change, offboarding) are the most sought-after business processes to automate, with 54% of respondents naming them as those that would benefit most from workflow automations.
But, starting today, IT can very much make this all a breeze. Join us in our latest Webinar as we explore the worlds of:
- Employee lifecycle automation – what & how
- The productivity benefits of Workflows for IT and employees alike
- The security benefits of automated, air-tight permission management
Dror Arie, a Senior Cloud Solutions Architect at GlobalDots, discusses how companies can leverage workflow automations found in today’s advanced IAM (Identity & Access Management) solutions to instantly grow the workforce. Not only doesn’t this come at the cost of security or compliance – it makes them ever greater.
Going Beyond Today’s IAM Solutions
Most growing businesses turn to IAM solutions for InfoSec compliance purposes. These IAM solutions rely almost exclusively on MFA and SSO to achieve compliance.
However, classic SSO Solutions often offer only authentication, not authorization. This necessitates users to create a new account or have an existing account in order to authenticate. This also necessitates that someone predefined that user’s permissions in order to allow them any access to the application. Therefore, whenever a new user needs access or you need to remove access from a user, your IT department must go through a manual provisioning process. They must receive the correct information from your HR department, then determine the appropriate permissions, and finally create the account.
In a modern IAM solution, this entire process is automated from account provisioning and de-provision to authorization management. With this automation, growing companies can easily scale their employment by 10X each year, whether they currently have 30 employees or 3,000. It gives IT departments unprecedented scalability, and relieves them from one of their most annoying duties – that of permission management.
Read Case Study: GlobalDots helps Pagaya automate headcount hypergrowth with Okta Workflows
How Permission Automation Benefits Security & Compliance
When done manually, the inevitable, frequent delays in deprovisioning bring about significant permission sprawl issues. With workflow automations, permissions become a direct, real-time reflection of the employee details in the HR system. This means that role change or offboarding immediately results in revoking excessive permissions. This isn’t to say that permission management becomes an exclusive, unilateral HR thing. The sets of permissions per role and team are still predefined by IT – but as a rule, not per each and every single employee. In addition, IAM systems still allow flexibility in user profiles and support dynamic groups.
Watch the webinar for a live demo of workflow setup and rollout.
Overall, a modern IAM solution provides automation for the communication & coordination between all stakeholders required for provisioning and deprovisioning. This, of course, results in significant time and labor saving.
Automation in a Modern IAM Solution
With this modern IAM solution we have laid out, automation is the key aspect to improving efficiency in the entire process. However, we’re going far beyond automating the steps for adding and removing user accounts. For these automations, we use a no-code Okta add-on called if-this-then-that. This add-on offers built-in connectors for common IT apps, a generic API connector, and can handle the complex logic and varied data types required for provisioning and deprovisioning user accounts in nearly all business applications.
Within our Webinar, we go in-depth on the workflow for using this add-on. After discussing the workflow for automating with Okta, we guide you through a real-world demo showing how these workflows are created and activated.
GlobalDots’ New Security Stack
Automation is key to creating a security suite that accelerates business processes and prevents security procedures from delaying them. Obviously, IAM isn’t the only area of your security suite to which this applies. GlobalDots solution architects have created the concepts for an efficient security stack that safeguards your entire cloud operations. This security stack includes 5 critical solutions for growing, engineering-led organizations:
- Workflow automation Plus Identity & Access Management (IAM)
- Governance of Zero-Trust Access
- Cloud Workload Security
- The Security of Open Source
- Automation of Compliance
To fulfill the promise of accelerating business activities by relieving IT & core teams from time-consuming tasks, each of the solutions listed above should have the following:
- A scalable SaaS consumption model.
- Readiness for DevOps customization and API integrations.
- Noise-Free alerting including alert prioritization, actionable insights, and remediation capabilities.
- Assistance with InfoSec Compliance.
With this, the team is readier than ever to take on both business and cybercrime concerns!
To learn more, download the full eBook: Don’t Fortify, Amplify: The New Cloud Security Stack.
Conclusion
Workflow automation improves both the security and the speed with which corporate procedures get carried out. They are especially useful for businesses that are rapidly expanding. Implementing them to their full potential necessitates a high level of knowledge. Cool companies like GlobalDots offer a breath of fresh air in providing solutions throughout a company’s system.
Contact GlobalDots today to make IT & Security operations a breeze, so you can be at ease!
The GlobalDots Company
GlobalDots is a global leader in cloud and web innovation discovery and implementation. The team at GlobalDots has helped over 500 corporate customers streamline and expand smartly over the last 17 years by delivering enterprise-grade Web Security, Cloud Security, Corporate IT, DevOps & Cloud services, web performance & CDN, and Cloud-native networking and infrastructure. These providers range from cutting-edge, innovative solutions to global leaders.
