When working in IT, you might occasionally be blessed with a budget that expands to fit your needs, but the reality is that most IT departments are consistently being asked to do more with less resources. As the size of the company increases, you don’t always get more staff to help support all the new employees. So you need to start figuring out ways to automate tasks and cut down the amount of work hours needed to support everyone.
You are in IT, right? You work with computers – you should be able to automate everything. Unfortunately, not everyone who works in IT is a developer. So if you aren’t a developer and you don’t have developers on your team to help automate day-to-day administrative tasks, what can you do? A simple suggestion? Look for low-code/no-code type solutions. There are a lot of them out there nowadays, some are built into particular platforms you might already be using, some are purchased separately.
For example, OneLogin’s Trusted Experience PlatformTM has several features that enable you to automate common tasks.
- Automatic Provisioning/Deprovisioning
- Self-Service Password Reset
- Synchronization with External Directories
Automatic Provisioning/Deprovisioning
OneLogin’s Identity Lifecycle Management feature gives you the ability to automatically provision or create user accounts for your users in over one hundred and sixty different applications out of the box the minute they are assigned to that application. Conversely, OneLogin can also disable that user’s account immediately if they are unassigned from the application or disabled within the OneLogin platform. When we don’t have an out-of-the box solution available for you, we have a no-code Universal Connector option that can be customized to fit your needs. Combined with our new Workflows feature, you can automate tasks beyond just creating, updating and disabling or deleting user accounts in the target application.
Think about all the steps you need to perform to set up new users.
- How many applications do you need to give them access to?
- How many different groups, roles or resources do they need to be assigned to in order to perform their jobs?
- When they leave your organization, how quickly can you block their access to all resources?
- How easy is it to assign what they owned or were working on to others?
OneLogin can help you automate all of these tasks. Some of your needs might be met by enabling simple features such as Full Lifecycle Management and checking a few checkboxes, others might need a bit more help and require the Universal Connector and/or OneLogin Workflows. But if you find your team repeating the same tasks again and again when onboarding or offboarding your employees, know that we understand your needs and we most likely have a solution that will help you.
Self-Service Password Reset
Another task that might be consuming your staff’s time is helping users who have forgotten their password. This is a simple task and might only take a few minutes to solve per user, but when you have hundreds or thousands of users to serve, these minutes add up.
With OneLogin, users can reset their own passwords, so there is no need for them to reach out to the IT department to do this. AND because you would be using OneLogin as the central portal from which users will be able to log into all their other applications without having to provide additional credentials you will not have to worry about them forgetting their passwords to those other applications.
Depending on how many users you are supporting you can save your company thousands of dollars in support time by simply enabling self-service password reset.
Synchronization with External Directories
Lastly, how can you easily get your new users into OneLogin so they can quickly and securely get access to the applications they need to do their job? Do you manually create them? Or do you synchronize OneLogin with an external directory you already have in place to track your employees, like an Human Resources Information System (HRIS). Most organizations have an HRIS in place and every new employee gets a record created for them within the HRIS when they are first hired. Often HR then sends a request to IT with the new hire’s information and IT creates an account for the user in their systems. This process takes up time and is error prone. You are now relying upon human beings to enter the data correctly and your data can become out-of-sync easily if the employee changes their name or their job or even their department.
OneLogin can be configured to synchronize with these HRIS systems so that these new users can automatically have accounts created in the OneLogin platform when they are hired and if their information changes it will automatically be updated within OneLogin as well. Again, OneLogin has several out-of-the box connectors that are available to help with this and if the out-of-the-box connectors don’t fit your needs, the Universal Connector will most likely provide the connection you need.
My motivation when using technology is I should never have to do the same thing over and over again. Whenever I find myself repeating tasks, I start to look for the easiest way to automate that task. Technology should help you, not make your job harder. Look for solutions like OneLogin that can make your job easier.
