Updated November, 2024
The holiday season is upon us, and no industry is more aware of this than the retail industry. The retail industry workforce often has a high turnover rate and by necessity, an influx of seasonal workers.
Lots of employee churn and turnover makes it even more crucial for HR and IT to work together to automate as much of the onboarding and offboarding of new hires as possible. An Identity and Access Management (IAM) platform, like OneLogin, can help. In fact, an IAM platform ensures that new retail employees are quickly given access to what they need from day one of joining the organization, and are completely and securely cut off when they leave the company.
A strong IAM solution gives administrators the ability to automatically synchronize with HR. When new employees are hired, they are typically added to the HR system. Their information can then be synced with an IAM solution, like OneLogin, where they can automatically be assigned to the applications they need, based upon attributes that were synced from the HR system, like the store they are assigned to, their job role, etc.
For example, all of the employees in the downtown San Francisco office might need access to a particular reseller application. The store they are assigned to is recorded in the HR application. This information becomes part of their user record in the IAM solution. Next automations are configured within the IAM that look at the “Store Assigned” field for a user and assign the user to that particular reseller app.
Users also need user accounts created for them within the applications themselves. An IAM solution can create a user account within the application, which is known as provisioning. Thus, with provisioning enabled within the IAM, users are not only assigned to the application automatically, but they also have a user account created for them within the application. So, from day one, they can log directly into the application and get access to what they need in order to do their job.
Many organizations have numerous applications that are assigned to new employees. Manually, it can take hours or days to set up new employees to use these applications, further delaying their onboarding. With automated provisioning, this time can be cut down to a matter of minutes.
Conversely, many organizations can become vulnerable when employees leave the company and still have access to various applications. IAM solutions can also help automate the de-provisioning process. They can automatically disable or delete user accounts within applications when a user is disabled or deleted from the IAM solution.
An IAM solution not only provides basic security—such as requiring users to provide additional authentication factors when they log in to prevent account takeovers or brute force attacks—but it can also help ensure a secure and seamless onboarding process for new employees. It is important to ensure that your organization is taking advantage of everything an IAM solution can provide to make your holiday season run as smoothly as possible.
