Increasingly, companies are using external parties, such as temporary employees and freelancers. This happens when companies need extra manpower or specialist knowledge on a flexible basis. To ensure that these external parties can carry out their work, they often need access to certain company data and applications. For internal employees, access rights are often managed in an IAM solution fed by an HR system. But this is not always suitable for external identities, nor is it always secure. So we thought it would be useful in this blog to look the three biggest challenges facing HR managers when managing external identities and how to overcome them.

The 3 biggest challenges

HR systems and processes are not specifically designed for external identities and their lifecycle (joiner, mover, leaver). This creates various challenges when processing, registering and recording these personal data. We discuss the three biggest ones here:

1. A lot of manual and ad hoc work

Onboarding and offboarding external identities often entails a lot of manual work and is extremely time-consuming. What’s more, the kind of work external parties do alternates sometimes. These movers need different roles, rights and access for these different activities. iD Veritas provides real-time processing of identity data of external identities in your IAM solution, so external employees can get to work quickly. That’s why iD Veritas can save HR managers time and money, as much as 70%.

2. Non-standard HR processes

Often, there is not a standard HR process in place yet to process data from external identities. Most HR systems are not designed for this. While these systems may be suitable for the processes of internal employees, which are fairly predictable, external identities are an entirely different matter. 

The lifecycle of an external identity is different to that of an internal identity. It is much more flexible. External identities can sometimes start on a fairly ad hoc basis, so it is not always clear when they will leave again. Not all processes can handle this equally well. For example, HR managers are not always aware of changing work tasks or when an external employee has completed his job. Often the HR system sets 31 December as the end date when it should in fact be much earlier. iD Veritas allows the people responsible for the external employee (the manager and/or the supplier) to change this information themselves. After which the access is automatically modified in the IAM solution.

iD Veritas also keeps track of who makes these requests or modifications. As a result, you make the ownership clear and ensure that the source of the access and/or identities can be traced. This can be very useful during a governance audit.

3. Processing and storing personal data

The GDPR rules for processing and storing the personal data of an external identity are different than those for an internal employee. For example, you are not permitted to store the ID or BSN number of an external employee, but in an HRM system, the BSN number is often a mandatory field. So this poses a problem, because if you do fill it in, you are no longer complying with GDPR. iD Veritas only collects and communicates the necessary identity data of external identities with your IAM solution. Thanks to the security-by-design architecture and privacy-by-default functionality, you also manage the identity data of your external identities in the most secure way possible. This way, you can demonstrate that you are doing everything possible to comply with GDPR.

How does iD Veritas help?

iD Veritas enables you to carry out the onboarding and offboarding processes for external employees in an efficient, safe and controlled way. You are in firm control of the entire lifecycle of external identities. You can achieve this in five steps:

1. First set up all external identities in iD Veritas. Manually enter them, upload a CSV overview or connect iD Veritas to your supplier’s database (via an API).
2. You or your supplier can then use iD Veritas to manage the lifecycle status of the external identities. Changes are automatically relayed to your IAM solution, which withdraws or modifies access and rights.
3. Now connect iD Veritas to your IAM solution. iD Veritas can be connected to any Identity and Access Management solution on the market. iD Veritas uses open standards (such as an API) to send and receive information to and from your IAM solution.
4. You have the option of outsourcing the data management of the external identities to your resourcing partners. This allows you to delegate administrative activities such as the entry, modification and deletion of external identities. All your organisation has to do after that is validate the information that was entered. Easy and efficient!
5. You retain control and oversight. The recertification process and extensive reporting possibilities not only put you firmly in control but enable you to demonstrate it as well. This makes it a lot easier to comply with laws and regulations.

Contact

If you would like to learn more about managing external identities with iD Veritas, please contact us at 088-9982020, sales@id-veritas.com. We look forward to hearing from you!