Integrating identity management into your workflow makes it easier for employees to move in and out of roles and access the needed applications. It also enforces segregation of duties and allows for reporting on the effectiveness of your identity management processes.
Onboarding
While only sometimes a pleasant task, onboarding and offboarding are essential to keeping identity management processes running smoothly. These tasks can take up much of your team’s time without the appropriate systems. Then, when users are given the wrong accounts or access to applications unrelated to their work, it’s a nightmare to rectify and reprovision the right controls. In the worst-case scenario, this can also put your organization at risk of legal and regulatory penalties.
Integrating identity management software into your workflows can help you reduce manual efforts, close security gaps and deliver on the promises of your IAM solution. Incorporate identity governance principles and streamline provisioning, self-service access requests, approvals and more. Integrating HR systems, directories and other applications can improve efficiency and accuracy.
You can customize many aspects of workflows in the Business Process Editor (BPE). For example, you can change the default action that a task performs. You can also specify how often the task checks to see if it should update its status. This option allows you to set the interval in milliseconds at which the task will update its progress. The default is 5000 milliseconds. You can also select whether to include trace messages in the task’s result object.
Offboarding
The last thing IT wants is a disgruntled employee using their accounts to wreak havoc on the company. To prevent this, it is important to have a plan to offboard employees when they leave the organization. This is where identity governance and administration (IGA) comes into play. IGA helps organizations strictly regulate what permissions go with which job titles, ensuring no one has lingering access to confidential data.
A workflow is a sequence of activities that represent a business process. Identity Manager workflows allow you to automate and control how you manage account provisioning, lifecycle management, and security policies. Workflows can also be used to integrate external applications into your processes.
Within the Identity Manager repository, workflows are configured as configuration objects of type TaskDefinition. You can edit a workflow using the Business Process Editor (BPE). When you edit a workflow, Identity Manager locks the repository while executing. This ensures you cannot modify the same object while the workflow changes it.
When you edit a workflow, it may take up to an hour for the change to appear on the Debug page of the BPE. If you do not want to wait, you can use the Delete task in the BPE to immediately clear the cache. You can then resume editing the workflow. If you do this, however, renaming the current TaskDefinition to include a time stamp when you save and import it is a good idea. This procedure helps prevent the loss of pending work items from suspended tasks that depend on the old TaskDefinition.
Access Management
To manage user access, you need authoritative data. To maintain that data, you must implement lifecycle management processes for employees and non-employees and ensure it is regularly validated and updated. It would help if you also established procedures for when and how to provision and de-provision access.
Workflows help you meet all these objectives. They can provide a platform for automating processes, reduce the time and effort it takes to manage users and enforce policies. Moreover, workflows can support identity and access management (IAM) tools like IAM policies, role-based access control (RBAC), and other technologies that help define least-privileged access for users.
The steps in a workflow can be as simple or as complex as you need them to be. For example, you can customize a workflow to automatically send an email when an account is created or to change the password for a user. The Business Process Editor (BPE) can view and modify the workflow components in the right pane or diagram view.
BPE enables you to select from various templates for various tasks, such as sending a welcome email to new users or changing passwords. You can also modify the process steps to specify a maximum number of transitions for each task. Once the limit is exceeded, the Identity Manager terminates the workflow.
Reporting
A secure and flexible identity management solution allows you to create workflows to suit your organization’s needs. By integrating these systems into your business, you can remove manual processes vulnerable to error and make it easy for your team to work more agilely.
Identity management offers even more flexibility in designing your workflows with the ability to add scripts into workflows; this means you can extend your existing identity management processes without affecting core functionality. For example, we have added the ability to run commands directly within a workflow. This makes it easier for you to automate tasks and reduce the burden on your help desk team.
Workflows define a sequence of activities that represent a business process. You can use workflows to customize account provisioning and lifecycle management and integrate external systems with Identity Manager. You can also use these processes to provide approvals and information requests for people and accounts.
