How The Economy Affects Identity Lifecycle Management

As the economic cycle changes (e.g., expansion, recession, recovery, etc.) , there are a variety of potential fallout events that can occur. These events can all have intense ramifications for how employee, customer, and other stakeholder identities should be handled by an organization, and necessitate a strong identity lifecycle management process.

It is important to understand these economic changes and their impact on the identity and access lifecycle management process​ in order to ensure that you have effective and secure identity management practices in place.

In this article, we will look at the effects that different economic cycles can cause within companies and how these changes might alter—or increase the demand for—identity lifecycle management.

Economic And Identity Management Lifecycle Phases

As the economy goes through changes within its lifecycle, so do the demands of identity management. Let’s take a closer look at these changes, and how they underscore the need for comprehensive identity lifecycle management.

The Impact of Economic Expansion on Identity Lifecycle Management

Rapid Growth

During stronger economic conditions, companies will hire lots of new people to help spur future growth and initiatives. With an influx of new people joining the company in a variety of job functions and roles, making sure that these people are provisioned with the right access to ensure productivity is essential.

As people join the organization, there are a variety of access rights and entitlements that they will require to do their jobs. To help streamline, building out strong role and policy models can result in time saved for administrators who can easily spend considerable amounts of their time assigning basic rights like email, 401k plan information, and more. Further, without these basic entitlements, new workers can be left sitting at a blank screen, unable to participate in their job functions until their access is approved.

Managing those identities to make sure they have access relative to their job, function, department, projects, duration of employment (if a 3rd party contractor), or otherwise can be huge in terms of optimizing productivity for the workforce; particularly when people are joining en masse.

Mergers and Acquisitions

During these periods of economic growth, mergers and acquisitions tend to also be more common. Creating the need to manage all the new identities that are absorbed in a merger or acquisition.

Even putting aside the need to manage the swaths of new data, applications, and infrastructure that come with an acquisition, having tools in place to accommodate the influx of people joining the organization, seemingly overnight, can be daunting for teams. Identity lifecycle management can make sure that these people are assigned like-for-like access that is secure but not at the expense of productivity.

Navigating Identity Management During Economic Recessions & Stagflation

Corporate Layoffs

During downswings in the economic climate, layoffs are an unfortunate action that some companies feel is necessary. Within the context of identity management, as layoffs happen organizations need to move quickly to deprovision access for anyone leaving their organization.

Some employees or contractors may feel slighted and, in some cases, waking up one day without a job may make people act vengefully. For those with extensive access, this could lead to files, intellectual property, sensitive data, or company secrets being maliciously stolen on an employee’s way out.

On another, less malicious, but still dangerous note, as people are let go—if their access remains active—they can serve as easy targets for attackers to breach the network and masquerade as a trusted insider. Unowned or orphaned accounts are less likely to be monitored and can be challenging for organizations to manually assign ownership of.

Identity lifecycle management helps to automatically de-provision access as soon as an identity is no longer part of the organization and helps to assign now-unowned accounts elsewhere.

Hiring Freezes

Another potential downside of economic stagnation is companies freezing or slowing their hiring practices. Inherently, this trend does not add, or remove, any identities, but instead may cause existing workers to take on new jobs, wear multiple hats, or move departments to cover for others.

As people take on new or different projects, their old access may become redundant and should be removed. This function of identity lifecycle management helps to prevent entitlement creep, which can result in blind spots and other soft targets for attackers to exploit.

Adapting Identity Lifecycle Management For Economic Recovery

Onboarding New Hires

During times of economic recovery, businesses are likely to be hiring as they look to regrow after widespread layoffs. In these instances, it is especially important that companies properly manage identities to ensure efficient onboarding and provisioning processes that help support business expansion, instead of hindering it. Access privileges also need to be thoroughly reviewed and reevaluated during this time, to make sure that access provisioning processes are remaining aligned with expanding business needs.

During these periods of regrowth, companies should invest in identity management technologies to enhance their security and compliance, ensuring scalability and flexibility when choosing an identity management system.

Leverage Omada for Better Identity Lifecycle Management

Handling the entirety of each identity’s lifecycle without automated processes does not have to be time-consuming, costly, or error-prone. Omada is a leading expert in identity lifecycle management.

Learn more about Omada Identity Cloud and book a demo today.