If you’re an IAM (Identity and Access Management) manager in a small or medium-sized business, you know the challenge of trying to secure a growing ecosystem of SaaS (Software as a Service) applications. Every day, there’s a new app that one of your employees must have, and it’s your job to ensure access is granted quickly, consistently, and securely. But with each new app, the risks of inconsistent access management grows. Is there a way to solve this challenge? Of course, there is. Why else would I be writing this and you reading it?
Read on.
Many apps can’t be easily integrated into your IAM system. The apps might support SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) for single sign-on (SSO), but that’s often locked behind an expensive “Enterprise” tier. And even if you can afford it, automated provisioning requires SCIM (System for Cross-domain Identity Management), which is even less commonly supported.
SCIM is an open standard that defines a schema for exchanging user identity information between systems. It allows IAM systems to automate the provisioning, de-provisioning, and management of user accounts in SaaS apps, ensuring that access is always in sync with the user’s current role and employment status.
Without SCIM, IAM managers are forced to rely on manual processes and custom integrations to manage SaaS app access. As your team and SaaS portfolio grow, these manual processes become increasingly unsustainable and error-prone.
The Challenge: SaaS App Sprawl and Access Management Complexity
So what do you do? Many fall back on spreadsheets and a patchwork of playbooks to try to keep up. But this approach has serious risks – and the risks get worse as you add more apps and more people with varying access needs and roles. This perfect storm of complexity spirals out of control, leading to inconsistencies, security risks, and compliance issues.
The Risks of Inconsistent Access Management
When onboarding and offboarding processes vary from app to app, it’s easy for things to fall through the cracks.
Imagine a new sales rep who starts work excited to dive in and close some deals, only to find they can’t access the CRM because their account hasn’t been provisioned. Or consider the IT team that thinks they’ve completed an employee’s offboarding, only to discover weeks later that the ex-employee still has access to sensitive data in a cloud storage app.
These inconsistencies not only frustrate employees and waste time they also create serious security risks that compound with each new app.
The Dangers of Access Creep
Then there’s the access creep. As employees move between roles, their permissions don’t always keep up.
“Ex-engineer Al Sutton revealed that despite quitting 18 months ago he still retained access to Twitter’s central file store on GitHub, a website used by software developers to store source code.” — The Telegraph
Consider a tech startup that uses GitHub Teams to manage their code repositories. When an engineer leaves the company, their GitHub account isn’t always immediately deprovisioned from the company’s GitHub organization.
If the IT team is busy or forgets to follow up, the ex-employee could retain access to critical codebases, infrastructure-as-code templates, and other sensitive IP long after they’ve left. This lingering access is a major security risk even if the engineer has no malicious intent.
Why?
If the engineer’s personal GitHub account is ever compromised, hackers could then gain access to the company’s crucial assets. As your company grows and more employees cycle through, the risk of this happening increases.
The Danger of Poor Visibility
Perhaps most concerning is the lack of visibility into user permissions across SaaS apps. Even with an IAM system in place, the lack of automation makes it impossible to fully track and manage access across all SaaS apps.
Consider an auditor who asks to see a report of everyone who has admin access to your financial systems. If those permissions are managed in a spreadsheet or worse, in someone’s head, you’re going to have a tough time pulling that report together.
And if you can’t confidently prove who has access to what, you risk failing the audit and losing out on big deals with security-conscious customers. Achieving SOC2 compliance with inconsistent access management is a daunting task that only gets harder as your SaaS ecosystem expands.
And even if you’re not pursuing SOC2 compliance, put yourself in your customers’ shoes: would you buy a product from a company that can’t even track something as basic as what their employees have access to?
The longer you wait to address these issues, the more entrenched and intractable they become. That’s why it’s critical to implement a solution now, before your SaaS environment grows too complex to manage.
The Solution: Centralized IAM Playbooks
By bringing all your access management processes together in one place – including manual steps, automated workflows, and everything in between – you can ensure consistent, timely execution of access changes across all your apps, now and in the future.
You gain a single pane of glass to monitor and manage permissions. And you can easily generate the reports you need to breeze through your next compliance audit, no matter how many SaaS apps you’ve added to your stack.
Why Legacy IAM Falls Short
But not all IAM solutions are up to this task. Legacy IAM systems often lack the flexibility and extensibility needed to implement truly centralized playbooks.
They might handle the basics of single sign-on and provisioning, yet struggle to accommodate the custom workflows and manual steps that are a reality of life with SaaS apps, especially as your app portfolio diversifies.
Introducing YeshID: Your Centralized IAM Playbook Platform
This is where YeshID comes in. Our platform is designed from the ground up to enable seamless, centralized playbook implementation. YeshID is the connective tissue between your IAM system and all your SaaS apps, no matter their native capabilities.
With YeshID, you can define and automate access management playbooks that work across your entire app ecosystem. You can quickly onboard and offboard users, keep permissions in sync with job roles, and always know who has access to what – even as your SaaS landscape evolves.
Looking for a centralized IAM playbook creation guide? YeshID has you covered. Our platform makes it easy to create automated IAM playbooks that solve inconsistent onboarding and offboarding, help you manage access creep, and improve your compliance audits.
We’ve compiled the best practices for SaaS access management playbooks into our intuitive interface, so you can get started quickly and confidently.
Best of all, YeshID doesn’t require you to upgrade all your SaaS subscriptions to the most expensive enterprise tier. Our platform works with the tools you already have, filling in the gaps and bringing everything together under one roof.
Take Control of Your SaaS Access Management with YeshID
If you’re tired of juggling multiple access management playbooks, losing sleep over compliance audits, and constantly worrying about the security risks lurking in your SaaS shadows, it’s time to take a look at YeshID.
With our platform, you can finally close the loop on IAM and focus on the high-value projects that really matter.
Access management in the age of SaaS sprawl is a big challenge, but it’s not an impossible one. By embracing centralized playbooks and a tool like YeshID, you can tame the access management chaos, stay secure and compliant, and prove the strategic value of IAM to your organization.
The future of identity and access management is here – and the risks of inaction are too high to ignore. Are you ready to seize control of your identity & access management? Get YeshID Onboard for free and start today.
