March 25, 2024
April 2, 2024
12 min read
Securing Business Success: Best Practices of Tech Stack Access Management Through Employee Life Cycle
In the fast-paced world of modern business, the lasting success of your company and you, as a business leader, largely depends on your ability to protect sensitive information. That’s because corporate data is your competitive advantage and, if leaked, might cause a big loss (either clients, money, or both) to your company. So it’s important to implement security measures to control employee access to corporate data. But even if you do employ measures such as strong password policies, multi-factor authentication and perform regular software updates, but do not control who has access to your software tools (i.e. to your data) you are risking leaking it all.
Tool Stack
Set of all the software tools and services a company uses to perform its business operations are called “Tool Stack” (sometimes “Tech Stack” or simply “Stack”). It includes all the day-to-day software applications like Slack, Figma or your CRM and extends all the way to the cloud servers like Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform.
Let’s briefly review the best practices you can, and we in Stackoon.ai believe – you should implement for safeguarding your data and preventing data leaks. Essentially by implementing best practices for monitoring employee access throughout the entire employee lifecycle.
Must-have access management practices
As employees progress through their career at organizations they typically progressively gain access to more and more tools in a company. Some employees can even switch multiple departments while working at the same company. And if they do, their roles and responsibilities are also changing and they usually get access to extra tools and data.
To ensure data gets only into the right hands it’s important to start implementing the following practices as soon as possible:
- Access Control Policies – introduce a set of rules and guidelines that dictate which tools your user groups can access and with what level of access. This should include your employees segmented by departments and roles, as well as your partners, clients and contractors.
- Access Permissions Reviews – periodically review user access permissions to ensure they align with users’ current roles and responsibilities.
- User Activity Logs Monitoring – regularly review user activity logs for all critical software tools to detect any unusual or unauthorized access patterns or implement automated alerts for suspicious activities.
- User Offboarding Checklist – establish a clear offboarding process that ensures that all accounts are deactivated and data is securely handled for any employee who is leaving the organization.
- [Pro tip] Automate Access Provisioning and Deprovisioning – implement automated systems that ensure your users get all the required access on day 1, then access is promptly adjusted for any role changes and also timely revoked when the user departs from the company.
One of the biggest vulnerabilities in terms of data security is the danger of an ex-employee retaining access to company data.
Critical access management: mastering employee offboarding
One of the biggest vulnerabilities in terms of data security is the danger of an ex-employee retaining access to company data. It may expose the organization to the risk of data theft, unauthorized sharing, or even malicious actions. This threat extends beyond the immediate aftermath of termination, as former employees with lingering access could exploit vulnerabilities over an extended period. That’s why we believe that swift and thorough access revocation is a crucial part for keeping your data secure and must be addressed as a first priority.
Access deprovisioning procedure
Having an access deprovisioning procedure in place is crucial. Common errors stem from poor communication between HR and IT, leading to unclear responsibilities. A company should have a clear owner of the offboarding process. Usually, the owner of the process is an HR specialist, but it could be a Head of the Department or a Team Lead. Then there must be a well-defined termination checklist that includes revoking access to email accounts, cloud storage, and any other tools and services the employee had access to during their tenure.
Access deprovisioning execution
The owner of the offboarding process should assign an executor (or executors), typically within the company’s task management system, who will carry out all steps from the offboarding checklist. A significant part of this process involves identifying which tools and services the employee accessed during their journey in the company. Subsequently, the executor must go into each tool and remove the user accounts. This is to ensure the individual no longer has access to the tools and data and also to optimize the company’s costs for software licenses associated with that employee.
Access management automation
We live in almost 2024, so you might imagine you could just get a tool and automate all of this. And you can, but there are nuances, mainly the costs and effort that current solutions require for implementation and operation. A typical enterprise setup today consists of an Identity Management Service (like Okta or Ping Identity).
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On top of which you can put an enterprise-grade SaaS Management Platform, or SMP (like BetterCloud or Torii). To make this work, you first need to switch all your tools to enterprise plans, which include SSO connectivity in their most expensive tiers, potentially tripling or quadrupling your software costs.
The next step is to replace any tools that don’t support SSO with those that do. Then, purchase an IAM provider and integrate it with all your tools, which can take multiple weeks to months. Additionally, setting up your SMP wouldn’t be quick either. And even after all this, you may find tools that are not fully automated in terms of access management due to the limitations of existing technology.
A company should have a clear owner of the offboarding process.
AI revolution
Thankfully, developments in AI have enabled us to solve this problem with a new-generation tool that automates tool stack management for any web tool without limitations. It also doesn’t require any additional infrastructure, such as SSO, IAM, or a switch to an enterprise plan. I might be biased, as I’m a co-founder, but I truly believe that Stackoon is a no-brainer solution for any small and mid-sized company that wants to secure their data and optimize IT processes. Otherwise, the only options are to spend a ton of money and time setting up an enterprise-grade software ecosystem or to constantly spend hours on tedious offboarding tasks while still risking overlooking access to critical tools and data.