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Video Transcript

Hannah Giles: Hello everyone, I’m Hannah Giles and I’m here today with Identity Talks to hear from our VP of Global Professional Services Neal Kaye and we’re gonna be talking about this subject that’s on everyone’s minds, remote work. And so, Neal, welcome. It’s such a hot topic that we’re all facing right now and it’s suddenly become kind of the default setting on how many people are working and getting business done. So let’s kind of start with the basics. Can you go into why there’s all this buzz and why it’s an important conversation, especially for businesses?

Neal Kaye: Sure. So when we start thinking about how the world has changed in the last six to I’ll call it 12 maybe even 18 weeks depending upon where you are in the world. The world woke up one day and everybody had to fly out of their offices and last-minute start to pick up their laptops and work from home. That change that necessitated a whole array of security parameter changes across the entire world, really.

As we look at those changes we start to need access to VPNs, access to RSA tokens or other tokens whatever you’re kind of local company token is, they need access to remote objects, not just from security, but also from trying to just do their work right all of a sudden. They probably went, most organizations went from maybe needing a couple hundred, maybe even a couple thousand Zoom licenses, to all of a sudden everybody in the organization needed access to some type of Zoom like interface where they can interface with their teams and others.

All of that access had to be granted in some way. All of those licenses needed to be doled out to all of the right people and quite frankly, very quickly, that’s probably one. And then you’ve got certain organizations around the world where you know maybe you’re a hospital or something like that and you’re not just moving people out instead you’re moving people in at a remarkably incredible rate. So you’ve got this whole new workforce that might be coming in to go and shore up your organization.

Hannah Giles: Yeah, those are great points. I know a lot of people are feeling that right now. So what does this remote work activation kind of look like in practice? Can you give us an idea, especially like what is identity help alleviate and not really just now, but the future of remote work?

Neal Kaye: Absolutely. So I would say that there are probably three main areas that we would want to think about when we think about remote workforce. So the first one is enabling that workforce. So 24 by seven self-service request. When you’re trying to make these many changes there are probably two different things that have to happen. One is that self-service request. I need access to something that is different, and my IT department is probably overwhelmed. So making that part self-service is pretty important.

The second piece is taking all of that remote access that is needed out to the broader audience, packaging it up into a very easily digestible role, providing that access very quickly, ie, in the matter of minutes and hours not days and weeks, so people can quite frankly just continue their business the next day. But that role is hard to just propagate, you need to make sure you’ve got all the right access.

So where does identity play? Go ahead and use a system like SailPoint to create the role. Then send that roll out to all of your major users. But that’s not just an indefinite role that they’re going to hold on to. You’re probably going to want to go ahead and setup a date in which you can automatically remove that access at some point when it’s no longer necessary. So that’s probably step one.

Step two. Going back kind of to that self-service request, making sure that people have access to change passwords. Right, request access. Lots of organizations use kiosks to change passwords and they’ve got various ways of going through kind of their IT department, perhaps it’s a phone system.

Those phone systems might not be as easily answered today because most of those workers are working from home. So having a very sufficient self-service tool that goes and sets all of that up and makes that easy, can certainly lessen the burden on an already burned IT tool team.

So the next one is the ability to quickly bring on new workers. If you run into an organization like health care and all of a sudden you have an influx, you need a very simple way of bringing those people on board, giving them the right access at just the right minute while also maintaining the security of your environment. So that last piece is probably all about staying secure during a time of crisis, right.

The world changed, you’re changing access all over the place. Having a system and a governance system in place to be able to validate that all the right people, in fact, have the right access very quickly makes quite frankly all the difference when you’re talking about the security of your organization and maintaining that security throughout a crisis.

Hannah Giles: Thank you so much, Neal. Always a pleasure.

Neal Kaye: Thank you so much, great to talk to you.

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