Securing a “Work From Anywhere” Workforce

Organizations across the globe felt and experienced the impact of 2020. Some were able to navigate the changes better than others. Years of digital transformation efforts were completed within the span of weeks with cloud apps quickly onboarded and cloud platforms being stood up to ensure continuity of goods and services to customers. Enabling workers with the access they needed to be productive was top priority and as a result, security policies may have been relaxed to ensure business and supply chains could continue to flow. The result for some has been a state of over-provisioned accounts, meaning users have been granted too much access – creating a bigger attack vector and more risk.

Identity Goes Beyond Access Management

Organizations who solely rely on access management and authentication to manage identities are most susceptible to over-provisioning and hidden security risks. Managing an enterprise identity program requires going beyond single sign-on, MFA and even basic lifecycle management capabilities. The good news is that an AI-driven identity security platform can quickly return rapid value while reigning in access across all apps, data, and cloud platforms. Examples of this include reconciling over-provisioned accounts with automated access reviews and certifications, identifying hidden and risky outliers who have too much access with intelligent insights and reports, and assisting approvers to know if it’s safe to grant access or not using AI-driven recommendations.

Identity Security is Business Essential

The true value of identity can be seen by organizations that centrally manage and govern access controls using AI-driven identity. Benefits such as centrally managing access policies across large populations, automating the provisioning and deprovisioning of worker access, and 24/7 self-service access and password management are enabling teams to quickly shift and take on new initiatives with greater agility and security.

Identity Security for the Win!

It’s crises such as these that shine a light on how well organizations are prepared to meet the challenges it presents. Our SailPoint customers share their experiences:

Investment Advisory Business

“We tripled our user accounts and provisioning over the past few weeks, and SailPoint worked beautifully. During this time, we had to respond quickly to the unusually high systems integration and SailPoint handled three times our normal workload. We are grateful that this is one less thing we have to worry about during the pandemic.” This is a powerful example of automation in identity helping businesses quickly react, no matter what external or environmental changes come their way.

Government Agency

Some parts of their network went from 10,000 daily concurrent users to over 200,000 during the initial part of COVID. The highest-levels of this agency wanted to have continuous monitoring of access, suitability, deprovisioned accounts, and the ability to identify security holes. Not just once per year with the old system, but as frequently as possible; and this is a very attractive feature of SailPoint.

Retail Organization

A global retail organization found themselves having to shift all retail location meetings to virtual. They were able to accomplish this in 6 days thanks to the automation they had built into their SailPoint identity program. This enabled them to swiftly and securely deploy video conferencing across the business for 10,000 users. Identity, particularly when aided byAI and ML technologies, helps enterprises adapt quickly and at scale.

Insurance Company

This large insurance company quickly pivoted from a 20% virtual workforce to nearly 100% virtual. With the help of SailPoint’s identity platform, they offloaded a significant amount of work around access request needs during their shift to virtual. In their words, “this was one less headache to worry about during COVID. The speed of now granting access is a win.”

Healthcare Organization

NYC Health + Hospitals (NYCHH) was able to quickly onboard 10,000 workers within a span of 6 weeks to support the needs of over 11 acute care hospitals and more than 100 clinics. When compared to the 6,500 people that were onboarded during the entire year of 2019, NYCHH was able to quickly respond during COVID. Automated on- and off-boarding has accelerated provisioning from days to hours – saving time and money