The increasing number of disclosed security breaches has recently shifted the public’s attention away from compliance. While no longer a hot topic in the news, compliance is still a major focus for enterprises. However, most CIOs aren’t measured on how compliant the business is – their success is measured in how much value they bring to the organization. But no matter how much revenue they generate or operational savings they find, CIOs are well aware of the catastrophic fallout that can result from compliance missteps. Unfortunately, compliance often includes putting processes and controls around the same initiatives that enable companies to grow and adapt – initiatives that result in the measurable value that position CIOs for success. So how do you choose between compliance or nimbleness? And should you even have to?

Often, a choice between two options requires a compromise. The difficulty lies in either choosing to lose money to compliance violation fines (regardless of the time and resources then spent to become compliant) or improve revenue by building a business intended for growth? Identity governance helps with both.

Controlling and managing identities empowers the company to easily achieve compliance while providing a foundation for business growth and agility.

The Power of Automation

Compliance presents a challenge to enterprise CIOs in two ways. The first is obvious: today’s enterprise ecosystem is complex. You have a growing amount of digital assets in various locations. Users are added every day, with many operating as contractors and other types of users that are external to the organization. Keeping tabs on all these elements can be overwhelming.

Many organizations have cobbled together manual or semi-automated controls in an attempt to gain the visibility required to address regulatory requirements. While it gets the job done, the management and administration costs to run these programs can be exorbitant.

Simply put, compliance is expensive and time-consuming. But you must do it, even if it doesn’t do much to advance the business. In fact, the cost and resources required to manage user access – a key metric in regulatory reviews and audits – can actually divert attention from initiatives that will empower the business.

To make compliance a strategic enabler for the business, you must automate it. Taking it off your plate saves measurable amounts of time and money that can be applied to more business-driven initiatives. The only way to automate compliance is with identity governance. See all the applications, users and systems in your ecosystem. Know, at a glance, who has access to what. Manage user access based on roles or functions without requiring human intervention. Reduce the risk of human error. Get valuable hours back in your day.

Automating Compliance

SailPoint customer, Orrstown Bank, deployed IdentityNow to replace the manual processes they had in place to certify user access to applications on their network. They now have comprehensive visibility into which users have access to which application, which makes it easier and faster to terminate access when employees leave the organization. By automating access certifications – as well as password management for more than 100 applications – they have reduced the time it takes to certify access by 2,000 hours a year.

The Power of Simplicity

If automated identity governance is good, simplified identity governance is better. Cloud-based identity governance multiplies the benefits of automation by making it easy. There’s no hardware to buy, no software to upgrade and no maintenance of any kind to be done by your IT team. In addition to saving hours per month by automating compliance processes, you can save even more time by eliminating the management of your identity governance solution.

Furthermore, in order for IT to become a tool for business empowerment, CIOs are streamlining their teams. They are hiring business-savvy workers with a broader skill set versus a deep bench of technical knowledge. Moving your identity governance into the cloud and removing the burden of managing the solution means that these teams can put their focus on initiatives that drive the business forward.

SailPoint has greatly simplified our lives and we don’t know how we lived without it.

— Orrstown Bank

SailPoint’s Cloud-based Identity Governance Can Help

Cloud-based identity governance simplifies the process of automating compliance activities so that business can get back to what they do best – running their business. SailPoint’s IdentityNow enables you to achieve complex compliance requirements with a powerful identity governance solution that requires zero maintenance, upkeep or technical management. With IdentityNow, you no longer have to compromise between focusing on compliance or building an agile business.

Identity at the Speed of Cloud™

Today’s enterprises are cloud enterprises. They’re adopting the cloud at an ever-increasing rate, and Gartner estimates that 90% of enterprises will have a hybrid environment in the next few years. The cloud is changing how we work – employees can now work wherever they want, and on whatever device they want to work – but it’s also presenting new challenges. These users – identities – are who access the sensitive information in an organization, and it’s them around which we must center our security.

Identity is what powers the cloud and it is what enables organizations to securely adopt new technologies while still being able to have full visibility and control over who has access to what sensitive information. When identity governance is delivered from the cloud itself, it grants the crucial security, compliance and automation that organizations need while also offering all the benefits of a cloud-based solution.

But it’s also more than just security. Once enterprises know that through their efforts, the business is safer, more efficient and better protected, they are free to do what they set out to do in the first place: improve the organization. Whether that means gaining a competitive advantage, chasing new opportunities for growth, or providing a better experience for its customers, the empowerment organizations gain with identity governance is what allows them to be confident, fearless and unstoppable. Learn More.

Find out how SailPoint can help your organization.

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