“Custom” is not often associated with efficiency. For example, a custom kitchen cabinet takes longer to manufacture and will cost you more money than a standard cabinet. Building (and maintaining) a custom app for your company takes longer than using an existing app.
So how does creating custom mappings in an IAM platform increase efficiency for IT departments? Doesn’t it, like the kitchen cabinet and company app, take longer to build?
Saves Time (and Money)
Although creating the framework that will automate user provisioning and security policies takes time to set up, this time pales in comparison to continuing to rely on manual processes for managing users.
For example, let’s take a company with, say 1000 employees whose average salary is $76,000 a year, where an IT admin makes $100,000 a year, and where the average employee tenure is 4.6 years (the US national average). At that length of tenure, the company will lose 217 employees per year, so to maintain a constant company size of 1000 employees, they need to hire 217 employees annually.
After filling in some more information and doing some simple calculations, you’ll find manual user provisioning costs this company about $18,000 a year. Here’s how we calculated this.
Manual User Provisioning Costs
| Provisioning Variable | Cost of Variable | How Cost is Calculated |
|---|---|---|
| Time to provision new user, per app | 5 minutes | Assumption (YMMV) |
| Number of apps per new user | 20 apps | Assumption |
| Time to provision new user | 100 minutes/user | = 1 * 2 |
| IT admin salary | $100,000/year | Assumption |
| IT admin cost/hour | $50/hour | = 4 ÷ 50 week/year ÷ 40 hours/week |
| Cost to provision new user | $83/user | = 5 * (3 ÷ 60 minutes/hour) |
| Number of employees | 1000 employees | Assumption |
| Average employee tenure | 4.6 years | Assumption |
| # of new users/year | 217 employees/year | Assumption |
| Total New user provisioning costs/year | $18,000/year | = 6 * 9 |
Works Because It’s Designed to Best Fit Your Needs
The power behind anything custom is it’s uniquely designed to best fit your needs. You won’t have to try to “fit a square peg into a round hole.”
When looking for an identity provider, one of the things you’ll want to look for is whether they have custom mappings. Will their mapping capabilities allow you to set up user provisioning in an efficient manner? Or will you have to reconfigure groups and policies for the mapping engine to work?
For example, OneLogin’s mapping engine is flexible in allowing you to use only the pieces that make sense for your cloud applications. This versatility lets you line up existing groups and security policies in ways that are easy to map OneLogin access to them—which also saves the work you’ve already done.
Watch OneLogin’s Professional Services Team explain how they transformed complex manual processes for Dawson, an environmental consultancy, to automated ones through OneLogin’s powerful mapping engine.
Get a more in-depth understanding of the challenges and solutions behind one of our customer’s user management situation. Download the customer story.
