The CIO of a mid-sized financial services firm tells a story that’s becoming all too common. Their IT director pulled an all-nighter to provision access for five new hires starting the next morning. By 6 AM, after consuming dangerous amounts of coffee, he looked up bleary-eyed and said, “There has to be a better way to handle identity lifecycle processes.”
He was correct. Following decades of manual identity and access management exposing organizations to risk, burned out, and perpetually playing catch-up, visionary companies are taking the plunge to Next-Gen IAM Automation. The transformation in how they manage identity governance can be nothing short of revolutionary. Next-Gen IAM Automation is revolutionizing how businesses handle identity lifecycle processes, leveraging cutting-edge workflows and robotic process automation (RPA) to streamline onboarding, offboarding, and entitlement reviews.
When Manual Identity Management Fails
Consider the following example that occurs daily in companies. An experienced coder walks out one day. During the confusion of the exit and subsequent replacement recruiting, the offboarding process is missed – precisely, no access was deprovisioned on the code bases. Weeks afterwards, proprietary software appears in the offering of a rival company.
The price? Tens of hundreds of thousands in attorney fees, millions of executive hours, and reputations destroyed that lingers for years.
This isn’t an isolated incident. Common identity management breaking points include:
Time-consuming onboarding – Provisioning backlog of new employees who cannot be granted access to key systems for weeks
Security vulnerabilities – Entitlement reviews exposing dozens of long-gone employees’ orphaned accounts
Audit complexities – Audits finding that 60-70% of employees have inappropriately broad access privileges defying least privilege principles
Scaling issues – Compliance teams taking hundreds of hours per quarter manually running access certification campaigns
These aren’t trivialities – they are significant business issues that undermine security, consume resources, and pose significant compliance risks.
The Building Blocks of Successful IAM Automation
Organizations that adopt Next-Gen IAM automation will often have four fundamental building blocks:
1. Automated Onboarding & Offboarding
The era of new hire checklists and panicky emails to IT is fading away. Today’s identity lifecycle management encompasses:
✔ Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) providing appropriate access to employees by department and role automatically from the first day
✔ Automated dynamic adjustments in entitlements as staff change positions through workflow management
✔ Real-time deprovisioning procedures to remove access throughout all systems on which the connected systems rely once employment ceases
One healthcare organization felt this advantage directly when an employee suddenly left. Their digital access was deprovisioned in minutes of HR changing their status – both safeguarding patient information and staying compliant with HIPAA standards.
2. Self-Service & Workflow Automation
Traditional access request processes often involved emailing helpdesks and waiting days for necessary system access.
The automated method creates self-service portals that initiate approval processes, directing to the right approvers. Most of the requests are completed in hours, not days.
AI-driven decision-making identifies patterns and suggests approvals or denials based on risk assessments. Chatbots & virtual assistants enable users to request access through Slack, Teams, or other collaboration tools.
The impact across organizations can be significant. Projects that were stuck waiting for access now progress smoothly. One analytics team reported saving 40% of project time simply because they could obtain data access via streamlined provisioning processes.
3. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) for IAM
Most identity tasks are mundane and vulnerable to human mistakes. RPA manages key IAM processes such as:
✔ Automated password resets (commonly saving helpdesks 10-15 hours per week)
✔ Account reconciliation between systems (capturing discrepancies before they turn into compliance problems)
✔ Scheduled privilege creep scanning to enforce least privilege access policies
✔ Policy enforcement on multiple applications and systems
For most organizations, password reset automation alone yields significant ROI. More significantly, IT staff can devote time to strategic identity governance instead of mundane tasks.
4. Continuous Entitlement Reviews & Compliance
Periodic access certification campaigns usually take weeks of effort when done manually. Automation changes this process:
Automated certification campaigns – Managers are provided with pre-populated entitlement reviews of their team’s access rights
Real-time compliance monitoring – Systems alert anomalous access patterns and possible segregation of duties violations
Audit-ready reporting – Documentation is automatic for SOX, GDPR, HIPAA and other regulatory guidelines compliance
One manufacturing firm reported their SOC 2 audit – previously a three-week scramble – was completed with minimal effort after implementing automated entitlement reviews. Their auditor said their package of evidence was the most systematic they’d ever seen from a company of that size.
The Business Impact of IAM Automation
The Next-Gen IAM business case goes much further than security enhancements:
✔ New hire onboarding time savings of 70-80% – new employees can start with appropriate provisioning
✔ Reduced IT tickets for access-type issues by 60%+ – allowing tech teams to drive innovation
✔ Rolled-up identity management tools sometimes saving tens of thousands of dollars per year
✔ Dramatic drop in shadow IT once legitimate access is easily achieved through the correct channels
✔ Audit preparation time reduced by 70-75%, transforming compliance from crisis to business-as-usual
Organizations putting in place comprehensive IAM automation would normally register the dramatic diminution of security cases involving undue access or mismanaging identity.
Future IAM Trends in Automation
A number of upcoming trends further revolutionize identity management:
Identity analytics based on AI spotting odd behavior and advanced risk-based access control
Zero Trust integration continuously verifying identity and access permissions rather than trusting users based on initial authentication.
Decentralized identity & blockchain technologies revolutionizing how organizations build trust and maintain self-sovereign identities
Hyperautomation methods linking IAM to larger enterprise automation for end-to-end effectiveness
These next-generation identity governance technologies are becoming more attainable for mid-sized organizations without enterprise budgets or specialized personnel.
Embarking on the IAM Automation Journey
Those organizations still handling identities manually should consider adopting this pragmatic strategy:
💡Begin with the largest source of pain – Offboarding and deprovisioning frequently yield the fastest security gains
💡Record existing identity lifecycle processes prior to modifying them – Most organizations find various departments employing disparate access request systems
💡Obtain executive buy-in with business metrics – Security is important, but financial officers are motivated by productivity hours regained due to automation
💡Leverage existing identity infrastructure – Effective implementations often blend with existing directory services instead of replacing them
💡Deploy incrementally – Addressing one identity governance process at a time per quarter facilitates adoption and tweaking
The path to automated identity and access management isn’t always a straight one, but it’s more and more essential in the current complicated regulatory landscape. Those days of provisioning by hand, access reviews from spreadsheets, and random offboarding are fast becoming as outdated as paper records in accounting departments.
What identity lifecycle management challenges is your company currently struggling with? The comments section invites your IAM automation questions and stories.
📢This wraps up Series 2 of my IAM insights journey. Thank you for following along! Stay tuned for my next update as we continue to explore the evolving landscape of identity and access governance. 🚀
