In the modern digital economy, Information Technology (IT) is a critical business imperative, empowering organizations to innovate, maintain business continuity, communicate with stakeholders, and ultimately, generate revenues and profits.
That said, the true value of IT can only be realized when it is used properly and by the right people. Since people are crucial for correctly leveraging IT resources; organizations must track, manage, and optimize the interactions between all these elements. Here’s where employee IT lifecycle management comes in.
What is Employee IT Lifecycle Management ?
Employee IT lifecycle management focuses on the people aspect of IT lifecycle management. Its aim is to control and optimize the day-to-day interactions between people, devices, and applications to ease friction and ensure business continuity.
A robust employee IT lifecycle management process powered by a robust and intuitive platform like Josys makes it easy for businesses to address the IT needs of employees at every stage of their employment. Equally important, businesses can minimize access- and management-related challenges and maximize their IT and people investments.
Employee IT Lifecycle Management During Employee Onboarding
Proper IT onboarding enables new employees to acclimatize themselves with the IT environment elements they will be interacting with. During onboarding, the IT team must create new accounts, configure hardware, and provide access to corporate email, software applications, online accounts, and data.
All these activities can become overwhelming and time-consuming when onboarding multiple employees, creating multiple accounts, and setting up multiple devices. Errors are common during this stage and can create access-related problems for the new joinees, impacting employee experiences and hampering productivity. Mistakes can also result in misconfigurations and vulnerabilities, or in providing privileged access credentials to new employees. All these issues can lead to security issues, business disruptions, and increased troubleshooting/maintenance burden for the IT team.
An automated platform can eliminate all these challenges, smoothen the onboarding process, and prevent disruptions and errors. It can streamline and speed up many onboarding-related workflows, such as account creation, device configurations, software installations, app provisioning, etc. Furthermore, it can also bring greater transparency into the IT estate, allowing IT staff to easily control, track, optimize, and maintain the resources assigned to each new employee.
Employee IT Lifecycle Management During Employment
In any organization, employees must be able to access the IT resources they need to do their jobs. The IT team must ensure interrupted access to these resources. They must also restrict access to certain resources, depending on employee roles and levels in order to protect the enterprise and prevent data leaks or breaches.
Furthermore, the team must track all role changes and associated access requirements during an employee’s employment with the firm. For example, they may have to set up remote access for some employees, or update permissions to certain accounts or data for newly-promoted employees. It’s difficult to manually manage all these tasks, especially as companies grow and the IT estate expands.
A unified and automated IT lifecycle management platform can simplify all access management, permissions, security, and account-related tasks related to existing employees. It enables IT teams to orchestrate, review, and control accesses and permissions, and limit access to sensitive data or business-critical accounts. They can also leverage the tool to easily update or revoke access, change permission levels, block credentials, manage remote employees and control which IT resources they can access, from where, and for what purpose.
Employee IT Lifecycle Management During Employee Offboarding
Offboarding is an important aspect of employee IT lifecycle management. For departing or departed employees, accesses must be revoked, profiles must be deleted, and all company assets should be recovered. A failure to complete these tasks can create serious security issues for the organization. It also increases the burden for the IT team because they have to periodically review and update the profiles, credentials, accounts, and permissions for employees that are still in the system, even though they should not be.
However, conducting these tasks can be time-consuming and grueling. One reason is a lack of visibility into the who, what, and why aspects of employee offboarding. Without visibility into who is leaving, what role(s) they have been assigned in the IT ecosystem, and which accesses are to be revoked and why, it can be hard for IT personnel to offboard employees properly, completely, and securely. The risk of errors also increases, which could allow some ex-employees to retain access to enterprise systems or data, thus increasing the potential for leaks or breaches.
The right tools can mitigate these issues and risks. A robust tool can provide greater visibility into the IT environment so IT teams can see what kind of offboarding activities should be performed – and then go ahead and perform them. With detailed visibility into the organization’s people, devices, and applications, and the interconnections between them, they can easily take care of account deprovisioning and credential removal, and securely revoke ex-employees’ access to enterprise systems. In the long term, they can save a lot of time and reduce their maintenance and troubleshooting effort.
Conclusion
Employee IT lifecycle management is vital to control IT costs, replenish technology resources, and transform IT into a strategic business asset. That said, the effort can get complicated and overwhelming as the IT estate expands. Josys can reduce the overwhelm through automation. This intuitive, enterprise-ready tool brings greater efficiency into IT management, creates powerful synergies between IT and employees, and enables IT admins to focus on higher-value tasks.
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