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Dave’s Top 10 Reasons for Identity Automation
October 15, 2024 | David Bullas
One of the most common questions that you get when you’ve built an Identity Automation Platform is pretty basic, but it’s important: “Why?”. I mean, lots of folks do “provisioning” (important quotation marks there), so why add another to the mix?
It’s a good question. It speaks to how effective marketing can be. If you put the word provisioning in your product documentation somewhere, obviously you’re now a provisioning platform. Kinda like putting AI in makes you artificial and intelligent. But when you’re looking to actually solve problems, you need something built to provision.
Let me do this. I’m going to channel my inner David Letterman here, and present Top 10 reasons an identity automation platform is necessary for your Identity team.
 | Centralized Audit logs, vault/credential controls, delegation, logging, Events/Errors on failures All of these are things you get when you use an enterprise product. When it comes to identity automation, these are features that will take all the effort you put in to making things work, and turn it into something you can repeat, control, and see. |
 | Access Control where it’s not managed by a group (it’s a setting) Here are some random examples: Many SAP settings can’t be set by a group Teams Access properties (no video) Epic user properties (settings set programmatically or in an INI file and not on the user object) Solid critical settings that can’t be set by group membership? No problem for an identity automation solution. Make it so. |
 | Modify data that doesn’t match somewhere else Often part of getting ready for an enterprise identity roll-out, cleaning up your data and setting your properties according to your rules and policies so they can be cleanly ingested by your governance solution is done by identity automation. |
 | Pre-Provisioning Need to do some tasks before your governance solution starts doing its work? What if they need to be provisioned before they’re in the HR system? Identity automation to the rescue. |
 | Confidential termination Everything done in your IGA solution is visible by everyone who has access to it. In an enterprise automation platform, you’ve got RBAC to ensure that confidential information is only visible by the people who need to know. Ditto confidential Merger and Acquisition changes. |
 | Change verification (making sure a change is committed properly) Verifying that your IGA solution is working can’t be done using your IGA solution. If it could, you wouldn’t need to verify it. |
 | User Access Review Reconciliation For a lot of companies under auditor scrutiny, you must do access reviews on every critical app. And you also must prove to your auditors that the information is accurate. Similar to 5 above, but this time more audit-y. |
 | Flexible Connectors Connecting to apps is a tedious (and expensive) business. An automation solution that allows you to connect once, and then share that data among all of the apps that need it (governance, PAM, SSO, etc), and does it cheaper. It also provides you flexibility if you need to switch out one of your Identity solutions. |
 | User create/update/delete tickets If you’re like a lot of companies, your IGA processes generate a lot of tickets, which in turn get completed by your IT staff. An identity automation solution can automate most of those tickets for you, leaving your team time to do their actual jobs. And the number one reason you need an identity automation platform. . .. |
 | Automation Seriously. You don’t buy a single sign-on solution to do ticketing. You don’t buy a ticketing solution to do access reviews. And you don’t buy a IGA platform to do identity automation. You need something that puts the work needed to implement your identity needs on an enterprise level, and that’s what an Identity Automation platform is for. |
So, there you go. If you need automation, get automation – and you need automation. A wrench can sometimes be used as a hammer, but you end up with a lot more bruised thumbs.
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