How To Eliminate App Access from Inactive Employees - Auto Deprovisioning

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If your organization heavily relies on SaaS tools for its day-to-day operations, you might've encountered the challenges of deprovisioning. Usually, when an employee leaves the organization, the IT or HR team has to revoke their app access.

However, most organizations still use manual methods, such as logging into each application individually or contacting administrators to revoke app access for ex-employees.

Unfortunately, this process is time-consuming and sometimes prone to human error. It can delay operational efficiency and offer limited visibility of actual SaaS access to the IT team.

The manual process of revoking SaaS access poses significant risks. A single overlook could jeopardize essential security certifications like SOC 2 and legal data privacy requirements such as GDPR due to the potential for unauthorized access.

You can implement an automated solution within your organization to address these challenges more effectively. This will ensure smoother, error-free, and more secure management of SaaS access.

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How are organizations deprovisioning users currently?

One common approach involves manual deactivation, where administrators manually visit each application to disable or delete user accounts as needed. However, there may be instances where they forget to perform this deactivation.

While straightforward, this method can be time-consuming and susceptible to errors. Organizations can use automated systems for employee deprovisioning to simplify and enhance user account deactivation.

Challenges of manually deprovisioning ex-employees

Inadequate visibility: The IT team often lacks complete visibility into the various applications that inactive employees still have access to, complicating the process of identifying and revoking access.

Retaining access after deactivation: Despite deactivating single sign-on (SSO) credentials, specific applications may remain accessible to inactive employees, potentially creating a security vulnerability loophole.

Human Error: Mistakes can happen in manual deprovisioing, leaving ex-employees with lingering access to the system. This can lead to unauthorized access and possible cyber-attacks.

Time-Consuming: Manual deprovisioning can be time-intensive, especially in larger organizations with numerous systems and applications to manage.

What are the challenges of ex-employees retaining SaaS access?

Manual deprovisioning will lead to errors and inaccuracies, and in worst-case scenarios, it won’t be able to identify ex-employees with app access. Here are some challenges of it:

Security risks: Inactive employees maintaining access to organizational resources can lead to unauthorized data access and intellectual property theft.

Compliance concerns: Delayed revocation of access for ex-employees may violate industry regulations like GDPR and SOC 2, leading to legal and financial consequences.

Operational inefficiency: Manual access management for inactive employees is time-consuming and error-prone, diverting IT resources from strategic tasks.

Data Breaches: Lingering access for former employees increases the risk of data breaches and unauthorized access.

Corporate Espionage: Ex-employees with access to proprietary information may misuse or share it for personal gain or with competitors.

Reputation damage: Data breaches or unauthorized access from ex-employees can harm the organization's reputation, impacting trust with clients, partners, and stakeholders.

How will CloudEagle help your organization?

Ensure data security: With CloudEagle's automated deprovisioning, you can safeguard sensitive information by seamlessly revoking access for inactive employees.

Time and resource efficiency: Manual deprovisioning is time-consuming and resource-intensive. CloudEagle automates access removal from multiple SaaS apps, allowing IT teams to focus on strategic projects.

Simplified management: CloudEagle's platform eliminates manual maintenance of inactive employee access across multiple SaaS apps. It offers a comprehensive overview for simplified user access management.

Cost savings: CloudEagle automatically deprovisions employees upon departure, reallocating licenses efficiently. This optimization reduces unnecessary subscription costs, leading to tangible savings for the organization.

One-click deprovisioning: CloudEagle's intuitive interface allows administrators to revoke SaaS access with a single click, streamlining the process and minimizing the risk of errors.

How to automate user deprovisioning with CloudEagle?

SSO Integration: Connect your organization's SSO system to CloudEagle for comprehensive insights into user access across applications.

Direct Integrations: Integrate directly with identified applications for real-time user activity monitoring and effective access permission management.

Admin Collaboration: Work closely with application administrators to ensure seamless integration and data synchronization with CloudEagle, addressing any issues proactively.

SSO Reports Access: Retrieve detailed information about inactive users within the organization from CloudEagle's SSO reports section. Use this data to streamline workflows and deprovision employees effortlessly.

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Setting up auto-deprovisioning rules

Provisioning and deprovisioning rules: CloudEagle helps IT and HR teams automate employee offboarding using deprovisioning workflows. You don't have to visit each application to revoke access when an employee quits.

You can set up auto-deprovisioning rules and automatically eliminate SaaS app access from inactive employees.

You can automate the employee deprovisioning by,

Step 1: Navigate to the "Users" tab in CloudEagle, then click on "Auto Deprovisioning" located under the "Users" tab.

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Step 2: The number of active rules is displayed in the "Auto Deprovisioning for Not Logged In Users" section. To create a new rule, simply click on "Add Rule."

Step 3: Enter the necessary information into the required fields such as 'Add Applications,' 'Set Criteria,' 'Schedule Rule Execution,' 'Email Users for Deprovisioning Confirmation,' and 'Automatically Deprovision Users' to set up the new rule.

You can choose which apps to remove users from and set criteria for inactive accounts: 30, 60, or 90 days. You can also schedule the rule to run weekly or monthly and pick any day for it to repeat.

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Step 4: Review the changes after you set the criteria for the rule. Once you click 'save,' you will receive a section to add the rule name.

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N.B: The rule is now active. You can manage its status by clicking the options button and selecting the desired action to activate or disable it.

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Following these steps, you have successfully automated the deprovisioning process for inactive users in CloudEagle.

If you want to effectively tackle Shadow IT in your organization and enhance ROI, check out Joshua Peskay, a 3CPO (CIO, CISO, and CPO) at RoundTable Technology. He shares practical insights on managing Shadow IT in a remote work setting and introduces an ROI score for SaaS tools to help businesses get the most out of their technology investments.

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Why should you use CloudEagle's auto-deprovisioning over your current manual process?

As mentioned earlier, manually revoking SaaS access from former employees poses challenges. Automating this process will help you keep up with your organization's SaaS scalability and ensure timely app access for all, regardless of when they join or leave.

Using CloudEagle, you can transform your organization's entire SaaS app management process. The tool lets you easily revoke SaaS access from ex-employees with one-click deprovisioning workflows.

Thus, with CloudEagle, you can:

• Review inactive employees and their access permissions through the user's tab. You can also deprovision them across applications where access is no longer required.
• Identify the applications to which inactive employees still have access and use deprovisioning workflows to revoke those access, mitigating security risks and optimizing software usage.
• Customize and implement automated deprovisioning rules to log out ex-employees, ensuring timely access removal for inactive users.

Book a demo with CloudEagle to transform your organization's employee deprovisioning process.

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