Top 10 signs your approach to non-employee identity management needs improvement

Authored by Mike Conti, Product Marketing Manager

To increase flexibility and boost competitiveness, organizations have eagerly embraced a growing diverse population of consultants, partners, vendors, and other contingent labor, as well as non-human technologies like service accounts, bots, and smart devices. But it’s often difficult to gauge the maturity level of managing these non-employee identities. The challenges and risks can be vague (and unrecognized) because the operational activities are often distributed across teams. 

So, how can you tell if your organization has an appropriate maturity level for non-employee identity governance? Let’s dive in. 

Your third-party non-employee identity management efforts are ineffective if the organization: 

• Doesn’t have an accurate count of vendors or associated non-employee users or a clear understanding of what those users can access. 

• Doesn’t immediately cancel access upon the termination of a non-employee. 

• Manages onboarding/provisioning and termination/de-provisioning for non-employees with undefined, manual processes. 

• Views the risk of non-employee users as compared to employees but applies a fraction of the rigor used for employees. 

• Can’t recognize a former employee or third-party user who returns to the organization in another role. 

• Uses a green light/red light approach to risk rather than implementing risk levels with appropriate security controls designed for each type of user. 

• Approves privileged access without requiring approval of an exception or acceptance of risk. 

• Decouples identity management from third-party risk management. 

• Can’t automate compliance audits and requires expensive, time-consuming manual efforts. 

• Tries to manage non-employee identities by customizing an existing HR, building a proprietary system, or assembling ad hoc processes and existing systems. 

Your non-employee identity management efforts will likely be more effective if the organization acknowledges that non-employee users pose a higher risk level than employees and should be treated with more rigor, not less, and tightly couples identity management and third-party risk management.  

The SailPoint Non-Employee Risk Management solution provides better transparency into organizations’ dynamic relationships with each non-employee. Increase your organization’s operational efficiency while managing non-employees in an easy-to-use application that helps facilitate commercial initiatives supports regulatory compliance, and reduces third-party risk.   

By leveraging SailPoint’s advanced AI functionality, organizations can ensure that applications and data are secure by granting access to only the right identities at the right time, whether they are employees or non-employees. 

Read more about the SailPoint Non-Employee Risk Management solution or schedule a live demo.