Does your company hire outside workers or contractors who work for a limited amount of time at your organization? Managing these types of accounts can be a headache since there is constant movement, and employees of this type need to be quickly added but then also promptly removed when they are no longer working for your company.
Since these employees are often only working for a short period of time, they need to have their accounts quickly created so that they can start performing their jobs. Unlike other employees, they cannot be waiting around for days for all their accounts to be created. In a large organization this could process could take up to a few days.
The process at your organization probably looks something like this:
In order for a new employee to correctly be provisioned, the hiring manager has to get the correct paper form, fill it out, give it in hard copy to the help desk with a signature, and then many different admins go about provisioning the attributes of the account. This process often takes a while and has to be handled by many employees along the way.
Due to the high turnover rate of these types of employees, IT also needs to ensure that their accounts are properly disabled once they leave the company. More times than not this task is over looked since someone has to go into each application and manually disable the user. This is an extreme security risk since these ex- employees will still have access to the company’s data and network.
If this scenario sounds familiar to what your organization goes through a simple solution: Active Directory management software. This allows the organization to automate the account management process and not have to manually perform tasks such as creating and disabling accounts. By connecting with your company’s HR system, any change that is made in that system is automatically synchronized to all connected applications.
So, when someone enters a new personnel request the solution can automatically create new accounts in any connected system or applications, create a share drive, personal drive, profile, set up a phone, or many other tasks for new hires. The manager in charge then receives an audit trail of all actions and can continue to request additional services needed, such as hardware or mobile devices.
To handle the issue of disabling former employees, an AD management solution can assist with automatically disabling accounts. Once an employee is disabled in the source system, the software automatically disables their AD and all connected accounts to ensure the employee no longer has access. It also has the ability to transfer that employee’s personal drive to their manager. This ensures that any projects that were in the works are not lost.
Many organizations use this type of solution to deal with the contractor account dilemma. Learn more about this type of solution and how National Geographic dealt with their contractor accounts.