Identity Governance is very important for managing the right balance between security and productivity of any organization. Identity lifecycle is one of the most important aspects of identity governance.
Things like when should a user identity be disabled, created, changed, or expired can be automated using identity lifecycle. Not only that but anything related to the lifecycle of any digital identity can be automated and managed using identity lifecycle management.
In a versatile identity lifecycle system, the functions can be changed according to the needs of the business. So, how does it work? What exactly is a digital identity? Let’s find the answers!
What is a digital identity?
A digital identity is an identity assigned to people, organizations, devices, platforms, etc by an identity management system. It contains the attributes of any given person, device, etc which are later used to determine the privileges it’ll have, how much resources of your business can be used and controlled by it, and more.
The attributes are also used to determine the role and activity of the identity. These things help an identity governance system to keep track of how many people have access to the organization’s resources, the kind of access they have, and their activity logs too.
Why management of the digital identity lifecycle is important?
Managing an identity lifecycle without an automated system can be very very hard! For a small business, it is easy to manually enter a new person into their database and give them the necessary access they need. A new person may be an employee, contractor, partner whose account is then created by the IT team and given access manually.
But for a mid-sized to big business, it’s really hard to do these things manually. That’s where identity governance helps. And for an effective identity governance system, an identity lifecycle is required. It then automates everything from giving access to a certain account to revoking its access after a certain period of time.
Process for identity lifecycle management:
Most organizations use the ‘join, move and leave’ process to plan their identity lifecycle management. When someone joins a new identity is created with all the required access they need for their account. The process of giving access may be automated or manual.
The step ‘move’ is used whenever anyone’s identity needs changes with their access or privileges. More access might be added to their account or removed.
‘Leave’ is when someone is no longer in need of any access to the resources. They may simply no need the access or are prevented from any access because of some reason.
