Ninja Tip: Identity Management and Security for Terminations

This story is about a software developer named Dan. One day Dan notifies his manager that he intends to leave the company. Dan's manager thanks him for service and logs into the company's identity management system to start the process to get Dan offboarded. The request process is simple. And mandatory information is provided for Dan's ticket, the most important piece of information being Dan's scheduled termination date. This information is submitted into the system and sets off many actions behind the scenes. One of the most important of these actions is that the identity management platform contacts the company's ticketing system in order to create a ticket for the human resources department. The human resources department completes their tasks and updates the ticket status. And the identity management platform will check in and get that information and update its status accordingly. This is very important because, behind the scenes, things like company policies and everything else are being interpreted and handled by the identity management platform. This becomes very important later on because there are many restrictions imposed on employees when they go to leave the company. One of these being, in Dan's case, software developers who are leaving do not get to access sensitive servers such as servers that contain or store source code. Dan attempts to do this by going to the server and using the privilege system management technology the company uses. He goes through the normal process of doing that, submits his request. But this system doesn't just operate on information within itself. It actually checks in with the identity management platform behind the scenes. And because of this, it's able to see that Dan is a departing employee. And because he is a departing employee, he is in a restricted status. This causes an immediate notification to Dan's manager, asking him to approve or deny this request. His manager denies that request, of course, and sets in motion a series of other actions. These actions include beginning the process of shutting down Dan's access immediately, things like disabling accounts, removal of entitlements, and many other things that relate to Dan's account usage in the company. If we look at Dan's master information, the system has also flagged Dan as being a security risk. This is very important. Because now that we've identified Dan as a security risk, other safeguards are now imposed that lock out and prevent inappropriate use of Dan's accounts and other credentials. So the point of all this is that by having your privilege session technologies and identity management technologies working together, you can have a much more intelligent view of how to keep track of things like this when employees are departing your organization to safeguard your company's assets and intellectual property.