HR-Driven Identity Lifecycle

Many organizations use a Human Capital Management (HCM) system to maintain user data for employees and to initiate all status changes. This includes the pre-hire interview process, start-date, transfers and terminations – all of which are managed and initiated within the HCM. EmpowerID integrates with an organization’s HCM to detect these lifecycle changes and then automate the management of Compliant Access throughout the Joiner, Mover, and Leaver processes. EmpowerID supports all the major HCM systems including any that support the SCIM standard.

Compliant Identity Lifecycle

It is much easier to deliver access than it is to deliver Compliant Access. IT organizations have traditionally seen provisioning technical entitlements as the finish line which leads to overprivileged users, increased organizational risk, regulatory violations, and vulnerability to hackers and malware.

Compliant Access in the Identity Lifecycle is defined as a secure desired state against which a user’s current access must continuously be measured and adjusted. This contrasts with the traditional approach where lifecycle changes are merely a series of triggered scripted events. Compliant Access is defined in EmpowerID using position-based roles as well as policies to detect and prevent risk. The roles and policies are the benchmarks against which all users’ currently assigned access is measured. EmpowerID inventories all an organization’s systems to retrieve the users, roles and technical entitlements to know at any moment who has access to what. The actual inventoried state is evaluated against the desired “compliant” state and risk policies to detect gaps and initiate changes.

Gaps in compliance most often occur based on lifecycle changes made in the HR system. New joiners are quickly identified as gaps due to missing access to which they are entitled based on their roles. Users changing jobs or locations, or movers, are detected as having incorrect access. Meaning, that they are missing some access appropriate to their new position and still have access that is no longer compliant. And the last case are the leavers, these are users that have been marked as no longer with the organization and all their access is considered non-compliant. EmpowerID’s state-based Compliant Access Delivery engine continuously recalculates these variances of actual versus desired and automates the provisioning of new access and revocation of non-compliant access.

Flexible Lifecycle Workflows

No two organization’s Joiner, Mover, and Leaver processes are identical, so a cookie cutter approach is not an option. Attempting to bend an organization’s processes to the configuration options available in most IGA platforms can be a painful process which typically negates the benefits of automation. EmpowerID has unique DNA among all IGA vendors as it was developed entirely on a Business Process Automation or “low code orchestration” platform. In the EmpowerID model, entire processes are described and automated as visual workflow not simply the human approval processes. The unique flexibility of the “everything is a workflow” model allows organizations to maintain their own business requirements for identity lifecycle without compromising or costly and unsupportable custom development. EmpowerID’s Joiner, Mover, and Leaver processes offer common configuration options fitting most organizations needs with the ability to uniquely handle exceptions in the visually designed workflows. The flexibility of this model allows for much greater automation as well enhanced reporting and enforcement of Compliant Access policies.

Automated Provisioning to All Your Systems

The measure of any identity lifecycle solution is its ability to provision and maintain compliant access in as many of an organization’s systems as possible. EmpowerID provides one of the largest libraries of out of the box connectors for on-premise and Cloud systems available. Out of the box systems can quickly and easily be configured using friendly workflow-based processes. Upon completion of a connection the system is inventoried, monitored for changes and ready for automated provisioning and deprovisioning policies. Many of EmpowerID’s out of the box connectors offer much deeper support than is typically available inventorying and managing fine-grained application permissions.

Simplified Standards-Based Connector Development

For systems not supported by out of the box connectors, EmpowerID has embraced the SCIM standard to simplify connector development, deployment, and maintenance for customers and partners. The System for Cross Domain Identity Management (SCIM) is was open standard created to simplify, and automate identity management of users, groups, and devices across Cloud-based applications and services. The basis of EmpowerID’s SCIM support is our SCIM Microservice Connector Framework. This framework is a ready-made SCIM Server Microservice that allows customers and partners to develop SCIM connectors for proprietary applications without knowing anything about SCIM or EmpowerID’s API. Customers and partners are only responsible for their specific application connector code and nothing else is required to expose non-SCIM compliant applications as standards based SCIM microservices. This unique model dramatically reduces the difficulty in developing connectors and greatly expands their utility as they adhere to modern standards for interoperability.

Getting Started