Skip to Main Content

Identity Governance in the Time of Coronavirus: Part 2

Of the many lessons CIOs have learned from this global health crisis, is the need to be digitally transformed.  It is more critical than ever for organizations to move forward with their digital transformation initiatives. As organizations deal with rapidly deploying business continuity plans, enabling remote workers, quickly provisioning users’ access to new applications, and reducing costs, moving to the cloud is the new norm.

In this new era of social distancing, we see an increased level of awareness and the need for identity governance solutions.   Identity governance enables your teams to be free to do their jobs while your IT and security teams can ensure that the proper guardrails are in place to limit their access to what they really need.

In the first part of this blog series, I discussed how identity governance has risen to the occasion to help companies through this unique and challenging time in the critical areas of onboarding and access decision making. 

In this next installment of the blog series, let’s go a little deeper and explore ways that identity governance is helping organizations automate processes and provide self-service to increase efficiencies-all with increased security levels, which are more critical than ever. 

Improve efficiency through Self-Service and Automation: 

This rapid transition to remote and contingent workers presents significant challenges for IT.  While it is imperative that your business continues without disruption, how do you ensure that the proper controls are in place?  One of the ways to address this is by implementing more self-service and automated process-driven workflows.  A lot more preparation is required to coordinate and ensure the company systems can support a critical mass of staff working remotely all at a moment’s notice.  Providing this 24x7x365 self-service allows your workers to reset their passwords and request access to their essential apps such as business productivity and collaboration tools that are required, thus reducing IT helpdesk calls and allowing your IT resources to focus on more critical needs.  Some of our customers have shown savings of over $1 million in the first year of simply implementing password management!

Here is what one global retail organization told us – “We moved from our physical retail location meetings to virtual meetings in just six days thanks to SailPoint’s built-in automation. We moved from physical meetings in our 800 retail stores for more than 10,000 users across the US and some international to a full virtual meeting experience using Zoom.”

All While Staying Secure and in Compliance:

According to a CSO Pandemic Impact Survey, March 2020, IDG Communications, Inc. 26% of respondents have seen an increase in the volume, severity, and/or scope of cyber-attacks since March 12th. 73% say that the impact of this pandemic will alter the way their business evaluates risk for at least the next five years.  Hackers rely on and love distractions.  Think about the pickpocket who bumps into their victim, just enough to cause misdirection and make their swipe.  You can think of this situation as the most significant distraction that most companies will ever go through, and hackers will take advantage of it.  This is why it is critical to have a complete cross-organizational view of all user access and the ability to ensure that access is always appropriate, secure, and compliant with corporate policies.  Wouldn’t you want to be able to identify risky behavior or an over-privileged user before the actual threat occurs?  

In addition to all of these new challenges that your organization is dealing with, you must still ensure business is transacted in a compliant manner. Implementing strong internal controls and being able to report against them helps ensure organizations stay compliant with industry regulations, such as SOX, HIPAA, GLBA, PDPA, CCPA, and GDPR.

All of these challenges that I have discussed aren’t just unique to the coronavirus crisis. We have continuously seen these challenges as organizations move to the cloud and as part of their digital transformation.  And unfortunately, we will see this continue for some time. Still, as the Solutions Review article highlighted, the coronavirus outbreak brings identity governance to the forefront of the identity governance conversation in a way never seen before.

As the identity governance market leader, SailPoint understands these challenges and complexities better than anyone. Wherever you may be on your identity journey and dealing with the current situation, we can help.

To learn more about how to quickly empower your remote workers with the right tools and applications, be sure to watch the Workforce Continuity in a Time of Crisis webinar with SailPoint & EY.


Discussion