How Automation Improves Third-Party User Governance

Four Ways Saviynt Uses Automation To Boost the Efficiency and Security of Third-Party Access Management

Your company likely has hundreds — if not thousands — of third-party relationships, and the access requirements for your third-party users are often similar to those of your employees. This means a tremendous amount of work is needed to inventory your third-party relationships and onboard users — both human and non-human. Yes, even IoT devices and bots have identities to discover, risk-assess, and provision in your third-party ecosystem with the least amount of privileged access necessary.

Traditional identity governance and administration tools were designed to manage only employee identities. IAM and IT security teams like yours have been forced to cobble together information from spreadsheets, collaboration tools, and endless phone calls, emails, and texts to manage their third-party workforce. It’s simply not sustainable. Saviynt can help.

In the last blog in this series, we explored how delegated administration streamlines third-party access management. Now let’s look at four ways automation can boost efficiency, security, and reduce your risk of failing an audit.

User Onboarding 

Automating third-party onboarding would be a huge benefit, but it’s a complicated prospect. Each third-party company has its own source for user information, and these sources can vary. In some cases, it’s a federated record — a method of linking a user’s identity across multiple separate identity management systems. In others, it may be a spreadsheet, and in still others, it may be manual entry into a database. How can you get all of these identities into a consistent, manageable system of record?

Saviynt’s Third-Party Access Governance product not only addresses this challenge, but gives you options as well. You can add users via Saviynt’s Access Request System, bulk upload, or by connector to federated identity systems. This capability alone dramatically improves the efficiency of bringing on third-party users. And we provide a validation framework that ensures third-party organizations meet the security parameters your company defines.

Saviynt automates user onboarding to ensure accuracy and consistency.

Succession Management

When an organization’s administrator leaves the company, the immediate question is: who will take over those duties? Saviynt offers an automated solution. When an administrator’s access is revoked, Saviynt automatically defaults the users to a previously defined administrator in the organization’s record via the Owner on Terminate function. This automation helps maintain a clear chain of custody over third-party users.

Saviynt succession management enables a clear chain of user governance.

Monitoring and Terminating Third-Party Users 

To prevent inappropriate access to systems or resources, you can use automation to monitor and terminate third-party users. Any time a third-party user accidentally (or perhaps maliciously) attempts to take any action outside of the authority granted, Saviynt sends an alert to the administrator for immediate response. The administrator can review the user’s actions and either justify them or immediately remove access to prevent further damage.

Dashboards and Reports 

A final way that Saviynt’s use of automation aids IAM professionals is through dashboards and reports that automatically help identify potential threats to regulatory compliance. Through these dashboards, you can identify trends and address root causes of problems. For example, through a regular review of the Separation of Duties (SoD) report, you can determine what type of SoD violation is flagged. It might be a potential violation, where a user can execute both sides of a sensitive transaction — but hasn’t; or an actual violation, where the user can — and has — executed both sides of the transaction.

 

Saviynt’s dashboards and reports automatically help identify potential threats to regulatory compliance.

By monitoring trends over time in dashboards, IAM teams could identify particular areas that need attention, like a specific application with a large number of alerts, or a specific third-party organization that may not be administering their users appropriately.

In today’s workforce environment, the volume of joiners, movers, and leavers from both the employee and third-party ranks has increased dramatically. As you search for ways to respond to these trends, we’re with you every step of the way. With Saviynt, IAM and IT security teams now have automated tools to improve productivity, efficiency, and security to keep the business humming safely along.