With the intensification of market competition and changes in the economic environment, reducing costs and increasing efficiency has become the common goal of modern enterprises. To achieve this goal, enterprises need to completely change the traditional production management methods, and use digital technology to realize online data, personnel and behavior.
Data online means that enterprise data can be shared, collaborated and analyzed on multiple platforms, thus greatly improving production efficiency and quality. Personnel online is to realize efficient work and communication of employees through virtual office and remote collaboration. Behavioral online means that the business processes and operating models of enterprises can be automated through digital technology, thereby reducing manual intervention and improving efficiency.
In fact, the interaction between data online, personnel online and behavior online is indispensable. Among them, online unified management of personnel is a more critical link. Based on this, we will explore how Enterprise Identity & Access Management (EIAM) can help enterprises reduce costs and increase efficiency.
01. The value and challenges of EIAM
EIAM is an enterprise-level IT solution. Compared with IAM, EIAM focuses more on the identity management of employees within the enterprise. Through fine-grained employee identity management, it simplifies and manages business processes closely related to business information, such as internal identity verification and enterprise-level software access authorization. EIAM solutions provide key capabilities such as employee data management, employee authority management, and data security protection:
- Organization directory management: Enterprises need to comprehensively and accurately collect and maintain internal employee information, including personal identity information, educational background, work experience, skills and expertise, etc. This information is essential for establishing employee files, talent selection, evaluation, and employee training. Human resource work has important reference value.
- Employee authority management: Enterprises need to formulate corresponding authority allocation strategies based on employees' responsibilities and authority requirements, and assign corresponding operation authority to each employee, including the authority to access and modify internal resources and the authority to use office equipment and software. By precisely controlling employee access permissions, companies can better protect core corporate assets.
- Data security: Data security is one of the core functions of EIAM, including data encryption, anti-virus, backup and recovery and other security measures. Enterprises need to adopt a series of security strategies to ensure the security and integrity of employee information to prevent potential data leakage risks.
However, under the general trend of enterprises constantly pursuing cost reduction and efficiency enhancement, business processes and resources of enterprises are gradually introduced into cloud computing platforms. This move has gradually exposed many insurmountable deficiencies of the traditional EIAM that has been widely used in enterprises over the past few decades:
- Lack of flexibility: Traditional EIAM solutions widely use a single standard protocol to provide authentication and authorization services. With the continuous development of enterprise business, traditional EIAM solutions can no longer meet the development needs of enterprises.
- Low scalability: Since the traditional EIAM solution only needs to manage the identity and access rights of employees within the enterprise, it lacks external APIs and integration capabilities with other information systems. Provide timely authentication and authorization services.
- High maintenance cost: The background management and technical implementation of the traditional EIAM system are relatively complicated, and enterprises need to consume a lot of resources to maintain and manage the system.
- Poor collaboration experience: Traditional EIAM solutions can only manage the identity and access rights of employees within the enterprise, and cannot provide unified authentication and authorization services for employees from different organizations and regions, which limits the collaboration capabilities and cross-organization applications of enterprises convenience.
- Difficulty integrating with HR systems: In many enterprises, HR systems and EIAM systems are independent of each other. This makes it necessary for enterprises to perform cumbersome data input and export work when managing employees. However, limited by the scalability of traditional EIAM, it is relatively difficult for enterprises to realize the integration of HR system and EIAM system.
- Changing regulations and compliance requirements: Enterprises need to comply with different regulations and compliance requirements in different countries and regions, such as China's security level protection, the EU's General Data Protection Regulation, etc. These requirements may change over time And change. An enterprise's EIAM system needs to be able to adapt to ever-changing regulations and compliance requirements, so as to ensure that the enterprise can achieve steady development under the premise of complying with regulations and meeting compliance requirements.
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02. Event-driven concept, expanding EIAM capabilities to reduce costs and increase efficiency for enterprises
Authing is a developer-centric full-scenario identity cloud product. Aiming at the challenges and pain points of traditional EIAM in reducing costs and increasing efficiency, Authing provides unified authentication management, unified user management, and unified permissions on the basis of traditional EIAM. Extended solutions for governance and unified security governance help enterprises build a standardized digital identity system with identity as the core infrastructure.
Unified authentication management
Enterprises have diverse and huge business systems, each of which has complete and independent functions without interfering with each other. When employees perform their daily work, they often need to frequently log in between multiple different business systems, which affects work efficiency and increases their workload. Authing supports a variety of standard protocols, such as LDAP, RADIUS, OIDC, SMAL, OAuth2.0, and CAS, covering a wide range of industries and application scenarios. In addition, Authing also pre-integrates 2000+ commonly used application software on the market, providing powerful scalability and flexibility for enterprise business systems. Realize enterprise-level single sign-on (SSO) through Authing without additional development, and quickly integrate all software in use by the enterprise to achieve data interoperability and single sign-on. Employees only need to log in in one place to access all business systems in the enterprise, simplifying It eliminates the cumbersome system login process, enabling them to focus more on the work at hand and improve business efficiency.
In the Authing login console, all enterprise applications that implement single sign-on can be used here without entering passwords again, which is convenient for employees to use various enterprise applications efficiently.
unique source of identity
The disadvantage of traditional EIAM lies in its low security and efficiency, which has also become a difficult problem for enterprises to reduce costs and increase efficiency. Authing's graph model-based automated identity orchestration engine breaks the bottleneck of traditional EIAM and innovatively automates employee lifecycle management. This automated identity management method can effectively manage account switching and activation of corresponding permissions in the process of employee entry, job transfer, transfer, and resignation, thereby greatly simplifying the management process and improving management efficiency.
Take a human resource service company as an example. The company has more than 10,000 employees, and there are a large number of requests for personnel transfers and transfers every day. Not only that, because human resources services involve a lot of customer information, multiple systems within the company need to change their passwords once a month to protect Data Security. The opening and closing of a large number of accounts in enterprises not only brings great challenges to the operation and maintenance managers, but also frequently changes passwords, which also makes employees feel troubled.
In response to this pain point, the above-mentioned enterprises use Authing identity automation to customize and arrange employee management workflows, automatically pull upstream identity information, and automatically complete personnel transfers and transfers in batches. In addition, by configuring the account password modification workflow, it can automatically complete a large number of account password modification every month, and notify the corresponding employees of the new account password through SMS.
The use of Authing identity automation capabilities not only improves the efficiency of operation and maintenance personnel, but also reduces the burden on employees, greatly saving time and human resource costs for enterprises.
In addition, Authing identity automation can improve the security of identity management. By automating tedious administrative processes, businesses can reduce security risks caused by human error.
Unified Authority Governance
In the process of enterprise development, the organizational structure will be constantly adjusted and changed, which is an inevitable trend. In this case, the maintenance of enterprise information security is particularly important. In order to ensure that enterprise information is not leaked, enterprises need to adopt a more flexible and fine-grained unified authority management method.
Authing can help enterprises connect with upstream data source systems through RBAC (role-based access control) permission model and ABAC/PBAC permission model, so that enterprises can synchronize organizational structure and employee information in real time.
At the same time, by integrating the Authing authority SDK on each business system, the enterprise will unify the authority rules and authorization policies to the business system, thus realizing unified authority and unified authorization. In this way, enterprises can successfully solve the difficulties faced in opening permissions, unified permissions, authorization, and traceable permissions, and through the automatic arrangement of permissions management through Authing identities, real-time changes to the permissions of various business systems can be realized, effectively improving all aspects of the enterprise. The efficiency of communication between businesses makes the internal management of the enterprise smoother and more efficient.
Enterprise Digital Security Governance
In the digital age, more and more companies are facing various security threats, such as ransomware attacks causing system crashes, phishing to defraud corporate users of sensitive information, and internal and external negligence leading to data leakage. Therefore, the security of identity management It is very important in business operation.
In response to these security threats, enterprises need to strictly abide by relevant privacy and security regulations, and collect, store, and process employee information in a legal and compliant manner. At the same time, enterprises also need to establish a strict data security policy and process to ensure that the privacy and security of employee information are properly protected.
Based on the zero-trust architecture, Authing has built a complete set of risk control platform and adaptive decision-making engine. Through adaptive multi-factor authentication, full-link security audit, and multi-dimensional security assurance methods, it can effectively prevent data loss and security threats, and reduce business operation risks.
At present, Authing has not only obtained the ISO 9001 quality assurance system, the third-level certification of the information security level protection of the Ministry of Public Security, but also passed the European Union's "General Data Protection Regulation", which means that Authing's security protection capabilities have not only reached a relatively high level in the industry in China, but also Internationally, Authing also has sufficient information security risk identification and control capabilities.
In addition, Authing also provides powerful security control and monitoring tools to help enterprises monitor, discover and respond to security threats in real time, ensuring the security and privacy of enterprise data.
Employee Identity Management (EIAM) has become a key tool to help companies effectively improve operational efficiency, effectively reduce operating costs, and significantly improve work efficiency. It effectively helps enterprises simplify cumbersome employee authentication, strict access control, and precise authority management, thereby significantly reducing security risks and improving management efficiency, and ultimately achieving a significant increase in work efficiency. In the future, with the continuous updating of IT technology and the acceleration of enterprise digital transformation, the role of EIAM will become more and more important, and its value in helping enterprises reduce costs and increase efficiency will become more prominent.