Those in manufacturing understand that oftentimes, there are a number of difficulties related to the provisioning and managing employee accounts across the many cloud applications, operations and facilities that they have. For large global companies, this can be an especially difficult process because of the fact that these brands tend to have many different facilities, as well as employees, working in many different locations and time zones around the globe.
Do we need to ask why this is cumbersome for IT Admins? Probably not, but let’s take a look. When a new cloud account needs to be created for an employee in accounting, there’s a good chance that the process for doing so is very different than an employee working in the shipping department. Each department or individual position needs different accounts with varying access rights created for them. Many of these employees also may work in different locations since the warehouse might be separate from the main offices or may be in a different state or country.
Additionally, there is also the fact that often in the manufacturing there are typically temporary employees that are hired for short period of time, during seasonal or peak periods that need accounts quickly created for them. Especially during busy seasons when an organization might hire temps who need their cloud accounts quickly created for them so that they can begin work on the same day.
Manually creating accounts for each of these employees is time consuming, leaving them sitting around unable to being working on the job for which they were hired. This is because system admins need to provision accounts in each separate system or application that they employee needs.
Automation of cloud accounts across operations and facilities
As with in house applications, the provisioning of accounts in cloud applications can also be easily automated. This allows system admins to easily and quickly provision accounts for employees no matter what their role is or where they are located. It also ensures that they have the correct access they need in order to perform their jobs, without receiving advanced access rights, or too few rights. So how does this work?
An automated account management solution allows for account admins to synchronize the organizations HR system to any system or application that the company uses. The personal details of an employee, such as their name, address, department, position, etc. are all tracked in the HR system, which makes it the perfect source. An automated account management solution allows for any change in the HR system to be automatically detected and implemented in the network. As an example, a system admin can easily create a profile for a new employee in the HR system, and check off which systems and applications to which they need access. Accounts are then automatically created for them, without need to so in each separate application. Any cloud application, such as Google Apps, Office365 and Salesforce can easily be managed in this type of solution.
Automated account management solutions also allow for additional benefits, such as increased security. Since any change made in the source system is detected and automatically carried out across all connected systems, accounts can also be easily and quickly disabled. This is extremely important for temporary employees who are only working at the organization for a limited amount of time. In large global organizations such as manufacturers where there are several locations, it can be difficult to ensure that all accounts are up to date and that employees who are no longer with the company are disabled. To further ensure that accounts are disabled correctly, for temporary workers who have a set time with the organization, an expiration date can be set in their profile, so that their accounts are automatically disabled.
By automating account management, the manufacturing organization can ensure that they can easily provision, manage and disable accounts for any type of employee, at any of their locations, in any position. This ensures that they are not only efficient, but that their network also remains secure.
Dean Wiech is managing director of Tools4ever US.