Part Two: Your employees and the power of Identity Management

The soul of every company is its employees. Your employees are performing the labor that is delivering value to your customers, and good IT gets the tools they need in their hands on Day One so they can be effective and help the company win. 

To securely optimize their Day One experience and ongoing IT experience within your company, you need to understand, manage and verify their digital identities; not all employees should have access to all data, some employees need specific tools and software, some employees need to use specialized assets. To do this effectively you need to have IT personnel who fully understand the systems involved in managing identity. 

An identity management system is at the core of any healthy IT ecosystem. This is where you can organize your employees to fit your business processes, assign them to the documents they need, and provide them with the tools they need to perform the functions you have hired them to perform.  

Microsoft Entra is an identity platform and the bedrock of your Microsoft 365 experience. Entra allows you to allocate access to SharePoint, to devices, and to applications. It’s not just limited to Microsoft applications either! Entra can handle employee access to SalesForce, SAP, Oracle Fusion, ERP Next, Slack, Monday, Zoho, ChatGPT, and numerous other online platforms. 

As your company grows, it is even more critical to keep track of your employees and their identities to be able to seamlessly grant or remove access where necessary, while following Zero Trust best practices with the principle of least privilege. Entra provides all of the tools your business needs to implement this in a scalable, enterprise-ready way. 

This proper identity management keeps your business from the embarrassment of new employees stuck waiting, potentially for days, to have access to what they need and more importantly can protect from the dangers of manual offboarding processes. Imagine the following offboarding check list: 

• Deactivate Dropbox Account 

• Deactivate Adobe Account 

• Deactivate HubSpot Account 

• Deactivate Slack Account 

• Deactivate 365 Account 

  
  

You could make mistakes in your process especially if multiple people are involved, which leaves an offboarded employee with unwanted, ongoing access. This is one of the biggest arguments for well-done automation: Humans can be really smart but can make mistakes. With Entra, enabling Single Sign On is simple and ensures that when a user’s access to 365 is terminated, access to all other accounts is terminated as well thus better securing any business. 

Your business might be ready to win when it only has 10 employees, but can it scale to a hundred employees with manual identity management? If this is your position, consider that your Microsoft 365 platform already has all of the tools you need to implement enterprise-ready identity management, and it’s just waiting for proper configuration. Still a little confused. Let’s revisit our fictional company from Part One of this series. 

Widget Pro Inc. had just reached 30 employees, and had no process in place to effectively onboard a new employee because of decentralized IT. 

It’s easy to see how they got to this point.  When they initially started with less than ten employees, they were probably paying for entry level software licenses without centralized management, and their founders were probably still using personal accounts. This was fine when they only had a few core employees, and presumably little turnover. Widget Pro Inc. at this point only had one or two people managing their Microsoft 365 accounts and their AutoCAD accounts. Since the company was small, everyone was trusted with full access to their shared drive, and it was easy to shout over to the owner sitting across the room to create a new AutoCAD account. With less than 10 people, the same people might be both going in and out of QuickBooks and working in AutoCAD, so it would make no sense to restrict shared drive access between financial and engineering data. But once the company grew past this point, they had no foundation for restricting access or centralizing control, and there was no obvious point where their business processes started to buckle under the stress of growth. 

Onboardings and offboardings are relatively rare with a company of less than 10 employees. Widget Pro Inc may have gone years without a single onboarding or offboarding after they were first established. By the time they reach 20 employees, however, you need to delegate management of different platforms, each of which has accounts that need to be managed, and access to sensitive data. At this point, no single person can possibly know who has access to which applications, and to what data. At 20 employees, offboardings may start to become more frequent, and now multiple individuals will need to be involved in offboarding the employee.  

When John Doe joins as their 30th employee, the decentralized nature of Widget Pro Inc’s IT has started to buckle and fail in ways that cost money, time, and stress. Good IT and identity management is no longer an abstract problem like it was in a company of 10, it starts to become a fundamental part of building a business that can survive and win. 

With good identity management, John Doe could have been effectively onboarded in minutes. One person with access to Microsoft 365 could have granted him access to the appropriate AutoCAD software, file shares, and other applications he needed for his job. Mr. Doe would have been out of the starting blocks and spent his first critical day getting excited about how he could add value to Widget Pro! 

What can a small company do? 

If you need help getting ready to scale with proper identity management, and you are not in a position to hire an internal IT team, properly trained and well-versed IT solutions providers can help you get Enterprise-ready identity management. F1 Cloud Solutions has set up Entra for dozens of companies, including with custom in-house built software, with CRMs like HubSpot and Salesforce, and dozens of other major SaaS platforms. F1 Cloud is ready to help any SMB take the next step towards enterprise quality identity management.