What is Identity Lifecycle Management?

What is Identity Lifecycle Management?

Identity Lifecycle Management is an approach to managing the entire lifecycle of user, machine, and AI-generated identities within an organization. It includes processes and policies to initiate, maintain, and delete user identities securely and efficiently. Identity Lifecycle Management ensures that employees, partners, contractors, vendors and systems have a level of access to sensitive data and applications sufficient to fulfill their roles at every stage of their relationship with the organization, including when they join, when their responsibilities change, and when they leave the organization.

Consider this example: an individual user of an organization’s IT infrastructure starts as a contractor, becomes an employee, moves to another department, gets promoted, takes a temporary family leave, and eventually retires. At each stage of this individual user’s employment, their job responsibilities require access to different resources within the organization. To maintain the security of an organization’s infrastructure, an Identity Lifecycle Management approach ensures that user identities and access rights throughout this process are properly created, changed, and disabled. Identity Lifecycle Management processes enable organizations to monitor and control access rights according to defined roles, rules and policies to ensure employees have the right access levels at any given point in time.

At its core, Identity Lifecycle Management processes provide two essential functions: first, they ensure that when joining a company, users have access to all the systems, applications and file systems required to do their job, so they can be productive from day one. Second, they remove access to systems that users required in previous job roles, but are no longer needed in the new role, so access rights do not accumulate over time. This is critical because failure to remove access systematically may result in violations of security regulations and compliance policies such as segregation of duties (SoD).

Beyond these core functionalities, Identity Lifecycle Management processes also ensure that if a user account is compromised, an intruder will only have limited access to systems. The security boundary that these processes create adds an “identity perimeter”, an additional layer of security to augment traditional security defenses such as firewalls and intrusion prevention systems.

How the Identity Lifecycle Management Works

In general, Identity Lifecycle Management is comprised of joiner-mover-leaver processes. Here is a breakdown of the processes:

Provisioning

This is the process of creating and assigning identities to new users or entities (e.g., employees, contractors, partners, vendors, applications, etc.). Provisioning includes assigning appropriate access rights and credentials.

Access Management

Ensures that users have the right permissions based on their roles, responsibilities, and the principle of least privilege. Access management involves access reviews, Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), and policy enforcement.

Role Changes

This process enables an organization to adjust user identity permissions when users transition roles, are promoted, or change departments. Effective management of role changes prevents over-permissioning or allowing user to retain access to resources no longer required to fulfill their roles.

De-provisioning

The process of removing access rights and identities when users leave an organization or when an organization off-boards internal IT systems. This eliminates orphaned accounts that could be exploited and helps mitigate security risks.

Auditing and Compliance

Identity Lifecycle Management processes regularly review access rights and identity activities to ensure compliance with organizational policies and regulatory standards.

Automation and Integration

Identity Lifecycle Management automates repetitive tasks such as onboarding, role assignments, and offboarding to make administration less time consuming and eliminate the risk of human error. Organizations can integrate these processes with HR systems, IT management platforms, and security tools to create efficiency and accuracy across the board.

Triggering any of these processes results in identities being updated in accordance with security levels, business policies, job role, organizational hierarchy, and context.

The Benefits of Implementing Identity Lifecycle Management

Enhances Security

Managing the entire lifecycle of user identities minimizes risks from unauthorized access, insider threats, and orphaned accounts.

Makes Operations More Efficient

Automating repetitive tasks reduces the incidence of manual errors, onboards new systems and applications more quickly, and gets new users working productively on day one.

Simplifies Regulatory Compliance

Identity Lifecycle Management ensures adherence to data protection and privacy regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, or SOX.

Improves the User Experience

Identity Lifecycle Management streamlines processes for onboarding and access requests.

Where to Go for Help and to Learn More

Identity Lifecycle Management encompasses all the processes of an identity lifecycle from starting as an employee, contractor, or partner and ending when a user leaves an organization. This includes all the steps throughout the user’s life in an organization including name changes, temporary leaves or absences, leaving and rejoining the organization, and more.

In an adaptable Identity Lifecycle Management process, organizations can match user and resource functions with dynamic business needs. This includes processes for IT and business collaboration, segregation of duties (SoD), and industry specific role and policy models allowing any arbitrary levels of roles, role types, and classifications.

Modern Identity Lifecycle Management integrates multiple applications and systems (some identity parts managed within an application like ERP and some in identity stores like Microsoft AD) into logical business applications management for easy application and system resource onboarding, self-service access request, and governance reporting.

Omada Identity Cloud delivers the automation capabilities, visibility, and control required to implement Identity Lifecycle Management process organization wide. Omada Identity Cloud leverages real-time data processing and analytics to make Identity Lifecycle Management more efficient and improve security. Learn more.