Identity management can play a very important role within a support organization. When first hired, an employee is assigned an email address and login credentials. He or she uses the corporate email address to sign in to various systems like email, CRM, and Parature. Often times, support personnel require access to a wide variety of company systems to provide excellent customer service. All emails, customer data and support interactions belong to the organization, and when the individual’s employment ends, the organization must have access to and control over the data produced by the employee, while ensuring that they can no longer access the data.

Wikipedia describes identity management very succinctly:

Identity management describes the management of individual identities, their authentication, authorization and privileges/permissions within or across system and enterprise boundaries with the goal of increasing security and productivity while decreasing cost, downtime, and repetitive tasks. To this end, IAM solutions authenticate employees and authorize access to various applications and functions in the cloud and behind the firewall. Additionally, IAM also helps end-users and IT staff be more productive by automating tasks that used to be manual.

IAM Benefits Include:

• Improved regulatory compliance
• Reduced information security risk
• Reduced IT operating and development costs
• Improved operating efficiency and transparency
• Improved user satisfaction

Would your support organization benefit from IAM? If one or more of these ten signs apply then you will certainly benefit from identity management.

Your employees…
• Use the same password for all applications and never change them
• Manage passwords in spreadsheets or on sticky notes
• Can still access your data after they no longer work for you
• Forget user names and passwords on a daily basis
• Share and never change passwords for applications like FedEx and Twitter

Your IT Department…
• Is burdened with password related support
• Has zero insight into application usage and security
• Cannot enforce security policies in the cloud
• Lacks proper reporting tools to ensure compliance
• Struggles with integrating your directory infrastructure with the cloud

If any of the signs above apply then you might consider IAM. Recently, OneLogin and Parature held a Parature University session on this very subject. We’ve also partnered on a free integration that enables all Parature customers to connect their internal directories to Parature, enjoy single sign-on (SSO) at the office or on the go, and enforce multi-factor authentication. Best of all, OneLogin for Parature is free. For more information, click here.

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