Reducing risk and increasing compliance through non-employee risk management

What good is the strongest door lock if all the windows in your house are unlocked and not monitored?

Unfortunately, that’s the situation for too many organizations when it comes to lifecyle management and risk management of non-employees. For example, a recent PwC Survey found that only 40% of survey respondents say they thoroughly understand the risk of data breaches through third parties.

Too often, organizations focus all their efforts on managing the security related to employees but ignore the potential risks associated with non-employee identities.

A non-employee is anyone connected to an organization who’s not an internal employee or a customer. Non-employees encompass a wide range of users, including:

• Third parties such as contractors, vendors, suppliers, or service providers
• Partners including agents, franchisees, affiliates, and retailers
• Individuals such as freelancers, researchers, students, and volunteers
• Non-humans encompassing bots, applications, devices, and service accounts

Non-employees can make up a large percentage of the workforce for many organizations. However, managing their identities and access to systems and services is complex, and often organizations don’t have a structured way to manage non-employee identities.

Without a way to manage non-employee identities, organizations leave themselves open to numerous governance challenges, including the risk of duplicate identities, unreliable data, painful audits, high costs, overprovisioned, shared, and orphaned account access, lack of visibility, and significantly higher security risks.

One way to address all these governance challenges is by extending identity management capabilities and controls to non-employees. This can give organizations the same visibility into their non-employee users as they have with their employees and ensure that non-employee access is granted only to the right people at the right time.

That’s where a solution like SailPoint Non-Employee Risk Management comes in. SailPoint Non-Employee Risk Management allows organizations to easily take control of their non-employee identities and address the governance challenges listed above. It enables organizations to effectively and efficiently secure third-party identities via strong management and governance controls, allowing organizations to take control of their non-employee identities.

“SailPoint’s new non-employee risk management capability will give us broad oversight into all our identities and their technology needs, including better visibility into and management of our growing non-employee population, all from a single platform,” said Dane Paulsen, IT Manager, Nelnet. “We’ll now have a critical layer of identity risk management and overall governance needed to fully validate non-employees and their access across our business.”

SailPoint Non-Employee Risk Management creates a single non-employee record for each external worker’s digital identity, allowing organizations to easily determine why a specific identity exists, why it has access to given corporate resources, when and why that access changes, and why it’s treated the way it is. And even if a non-employee’s relationship with an organization changes, the system will maintain a single identity for that user. Non-employee identity and access records are kept in a centralized and scalable repository.

The solution extends advanced governance controls to the large and complex population of non-employee users. It strengthens security by providing complete visibility into all an organization’s non-employees and their access privileges.

SailPoint Non-Employee Risk Management is ideal for a wide range of use cases, including situations where companies want to improve the non-employee onboarding experience, replace existing homegrown solutions that aren’t scalable or provide strong security controls, augment HR-based solutions that weren’t built with non-employees in mind, improve their third-party de-provisioning capabilities, or simply need to improve their non-employee compliance capabilities.

The benefits of implementing SailPoint Non-Employee Risk Management are significant and include:

• Improved security. By providing complete visibility into the pool of non-employees, organizations can easily and quickly identify who has access to what and why. Non-Employee Risk Management allows organizations to expand strong security postures to their extended enterprise.
  
• Flexible and fast process orchestration. Organizations can leverage the solution’s flexible workflows for creating onboarding, offboarding, and daily lifecycle management process flows. This can help increase team productivity by eliminating previously manual tasks related to non-employee lifecycle management.
  
• Enabling collaboration. Both internal and external users can collect non-employee identity data, making collaboration with partners and third parties not only possible but seamless.
  
• Simplified audits. By capturing essential identity data and documenting the entire non-employee lifecycle, organizations can be prepared for audits involving non-employees. Non-Employee Risk Management allows organizations to demonstrate compliance with ease.
  
• Saving costs. With a drag-and-drop visual interface for configuration, organizations can eliminate previously time-consuming processes associated with more manual or ad-hoc management of non-employee users.

A good place for an organization to start is by evaluating the top ten signs that their approach to non-employee identity management needs improvement

If your non-employee identity management does need improvement, SailPoint Non-Employee Risk Management may be the answer. With it, an organization can easily manage complex non-employee scenarios in a similar way to how it manages employee identities.