Why Organizations Need a Centralized Source of Employee Identity Now More than Ever

Organizations have long struggled with maintaining and consolidating their employee and non-employee identities into a single source because they often must rely on disparate, outdated, or customized systems.  While the process for trying to consolidate identities is typically both tedious and time-consuming its highly manual nature also frequently produces inaccurate or incomplete results which may have far reaching implications.

This scenario continues to grow in complexity as companies expand their workforces through traditional organic and inorganic strategies, and also find themselves part of affiliate networks, or with large, increasingly diverse populations of non-employees.  While this further complicates their security and compliance strategies it challenges them to know exactly who these people are and who they are providing access to more so than ever before.  One way to organize this chaos is through automated and centralized global identity consolidation strategy that creates a unique global identifier for each identity.

• A centralized global identity strategy helps organizations solve common identity consolidation challenges such as:
  When there are multiple systems of record for one individual (i.e., a single healthcare worker may have their identity in the Hospital Worker records, HRMS records, and Student records)
•     Identity Sprawl (when an individual has many positions throughout their lifecycle with a firm such as contractor transitioning to a full-time employee)
• When multiple third parties (non-employees: such as contractors, freelancers, researchers, affiliates, students, and interns) need to be added into an organization’s employee records
• When employees from a merger or acquisition need to be added to a parent company’s employee database

Most industries are finding a new level of workforce complexity as their employee and non-employee relationships have more frequent changes and a person can even have multiple affiliations and relationships at the same time.  These relationships can change, and new identities may be created but each new identity comes with specific permissions and access to data sources that are needed to fulfill that role. This can leave an organization relying on inaccurate and conflicting data that may be out-of-date or leave them with multiple active identities for the same person.  This can result in an organization being both out of compliance and vulnerable to security breaches.

This is particularly troublesome not only for HR teams, but also IAM and IT directors who need to assign and track user privileges. As mentioned, companies have often relied on manual and error prone processes to consolidate employee and non-employee’s identity and access, but this won’t meet the regulatory or organizational pressure to protect corporate resources.  Especially since it has been found that most breaches are caused by third parties as in the case of healthcare.

Mergers and acquisitions also present a major issue due to the volume of employees and non-employees along with the disparate systems or outdated records maintained by the child company. A single master source that can pull data from different systems and immediately identify gaps and duplications before merging them into a key system needs to be quickly and easily created for all employees and other workers across all companies.

In order to reduce error and accelerate the onboarding of large amounts people, as in the case of merger or acquisitions, organizations need to adopt an automated identity consolidation system since it can enable them to simplify their Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) efforts by merging and organizing people data from many different sources such as disparate HR systems or other authoritative repositories.  An automated system quickly enables HR, IAM/IT teams, as well as CISOs to view the accurate identities of global employees and non-employees and make informed decisions about access and identities. A director or manager can manage all aspects of an individual’s relationship, and their entire lifecycle within the organization which can help reduce risk and stay within compliance regulations.

SecZetta can help.  We offer a stand-alone Identity Consolidation solution which maintains a single source of truth for identities and greatly reduces the potential for errors during onboarding.  The solution creates a current single master identity profile for all identities, regardless of their relationship to the organization and the system sourcing their data.  The benefits include:

• Easy integrates with the most popular IGA, HRIS, and IAM solutions, as well as homegrown databases or flat files to collect and merge data from any number of sources into a single system of record to create a master identity list across all companies which can be feed downstream
• User can assign weighted values to data feeds to determine validity of identity
• Automated large-scale employee and non-employee consolidation gained through mergers and acquisitions
• Point-and-click interface allows admins to easily configure and manage the solution
• Verified records in case of an audit or legal action
• Manual verification review
• Data cleanup in directories and applications to identify duplicate Active Directories (AD) accounts or other application accounts in order to support cleanup efforts or the creation of a Unique identification (UID) across these directories/apps.