For the wheels of any business or organization to roll smoothly, different stakeholders need to access a variety of physical and digital resources. Mind you, stakeholders aren’t limited to your employees but can also be customers, contractors, partners, and vendors alike.
As you can imagine, keeping tight and accurate control of your business processes, finances, information, and other resources is of the utmost importance. Any ineffective handling of potential security threats may have dire consequences.
But how do you make sure that people are only accessing the resources that are relevant to them? That's where Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions come in.
IAM is a framework of processes and policies designed to efficiently manage the digital identities of system users in a streamlined manner without compromising on security. So, what are the advantages of Identity and Access Management? IAM solutions offer several advantages to your business, including optimizing user experience, enhancing security, increasing productivity, and curbing IT costs.
With certified developers and administrators in its IAM team, Squareball is the official Okta partner for all your IAM solutions.
Are you still requiring one system user to have over a dozen usernames and passwords to access different applications or resources in your organization? Quite frankly, that's an archaic way of doing business and will likely compromise the user experience.
Accessing different systems to retrieve information can undoubtedly be a cumbersome and frustrating task for users. For your IT team, that means a constant balancing act to manage numerous processes in the organization and ensure that people get information according to their access level.
By employing Identity and Access Management solutions, you're basically killing two birds with one stone.
Another benefit of Identity and Access Management is mitigating security breaches and identity theft. Companies aren’t the only ones taking advantage of sophisticated technology to improve functionality.
Hackers are also working overtime to access unauthorized information. And the moment anyone accesses information they are not entitled to, the security of your entire organization is compromised. Identity and Access Management is an efficient process you can employ to avoid illegitimate access to your organization’s private information.
In addition, your business can use Identity and Access Management to effectively identify any policy violations and withdraw access privileges to unauthorized parties. Plus, your chances of passing a security audit or complying with industry security standards, such as HIPAA, are high.
The absence of Identity and Access Management in your organization means employees may have to spend time calling the IT help desk to rectify access issues. That could have been time spent on more productive assignments for both your employees and the IT team.
By simply employing an Identity and Access Management solution, password issues are curbed, calls to your IT team decrease, and productivity results across the entire organization.
Aside from increased productivity, you get a chance to cut down on unnecessary expenditures. How? Stats show that an average of 50% of calls made to your IT team are for password resets. And the average company spends an estimated $70 per password reset, if you factor in the time lost and the wages paid during the reset process. These are costs you can easily avoid by simply employing efficient Identity and Access Management systems.
Now more than ever, businesses need to be more vigilant when handling security issues. If certain company information lands in the wrong hands due to a security breach, the consequences may be dire. The ripple effects of a breach are inefficiency, decreased productivity, and unnecessary costs. Effective Identity and Access Management is the solution to these problems.
Streamlining the way your business handles user information and who accesses it results in an improved user experience for all your stakeholders. Users can access different applications swiftly, resulting in efficiency, and increased productivity. Your IT team can better manage user access and, therefore, be alerted to any security risks early on. Plus, IAM can help your bottom line, since unnecessary IT costs are eliminated from the equation.
For further reading, check out our other articles like Who Uses Okta.