7 Steps to IAM Pain Relief

Modern life sometimes feels like too much. Too much to do, not enough time to do it, it seems to be the modern human condition.

Technology was supposed to solve this for us of course. I mean, who doesn’t want a robot Jarvis that does all of the menial tasks for us so we can focus on more important stuff (like teasing Thor about his hair). I’d like a robot to help me with a lot of the grunt work I need to do to be effective, that’s for sure. But Jarvis is still fiction, and I’ve got a real life to live. I don’t have Jarvis in my life, and I have often wondered where the tools are that will help automate my life and make it easier.

The same is true for identity administration.  Jarvis would be great for all those manual tasks being performed today.

Identity Administration

Take the staple job of many IT departments: onboarding, promoting, and offboarding employees. An employee joins the company, they become VP of being awesome, they retire on a yacht full of money – obviously not me, since I’m still doing grunt work. But I digress – these events (joiner/mover/leaver) generate tons of work for the modern IT department; it is important work and a lot of it is repeatable, tedious, and not very exciting. And that’s about the perfect recipe for automated provisioning.

The key word is automation – lots of companies have a workflow system where a list of tasks is automatically produced when an employee joins, moves, or leaves – kind of a whiteboard where a TODO list is jotted down on a whiteboard for you. Less Jarvis, more Email. But this doesn’t save work so much as make sure the lists are consistent and the tasks are fulfilled.

As a sidenote, you’d be surprised to know (or maybe you already do) how many people in your organization believe that once a ticket has been created, the work gets done “automatically”. As long as “automatically” means “by you and your team”, they’re technically correct I suppose.

Once you’ve got your list (thank you workflow system), then you start doing the work. Seems straightforward. But now we’re back to boring, repetitive, tedious, important. There must be a better way – cue the upbeat, hopeful music.

Provisioning is just doing the work, not much to see here. Identity automation on the other hand means getting the computer (hello again Jarvis) to do it for me, and to do automation well, it needs to have some key features.

Key Provisioning Features for Automation

Bot Studio: A Modern Solution

 Thankfully the folks at Readibots have done the hard work here. BotStudio is exactly the tool I wanted, and the more I use it the more I’m impressed by its flexibility, its power, and its ROI. It delegates and shares tasks, and centralizes them in a redundant SaaS repository. It builds UI for me when I need it, I can call it from REST, it connects both on prem and the cloud with customizable out of the box connectors, and it comes with an ROI dashboard that lets me plug in my numbers to show real returns. It saves me time and money and I’m pretty sure it’ll do the same for you too.

 I might get my Jarvis eventually, but for now I can build myself a modern, enterprise provisioning solution to do a lot of my repeatable, tedious, important tasks. I’ll take it.