5 - Making the Business Case for Workforce Transformation

While digital transformation is a strategic priority for most organizations, the costs associated with it are often closely monitored. Because of the rapidly changing business environment, you can expect investments to be scrutinized.

To create alignment, you’ll want to identify the ways workforce transformation can drive business value. Focusing on how modernizing your IAM will increase productivity, security and agility can help you create support for this transformation.

Productivity: Ensuring a dynamic workforce remains productive with access to every resource to get their job done.
Security: Protecting the enterprise against vulnerabilities and threats by adopting Zero Trust principles grounded in the philosophy of always verifying, never trusting.
Agility: Supporting the quick and efficient onboarding of new applications and technologies to ensure successful digital transformation initiatives.

To make the business case for workforce transformation, you must demonstrate value. To get buy-in from your IAM peers and IT executives, you’ll want to home in on the specific capabilities that resonate for each audience.

What IAM and IT Security Professionals Care About

For the IAM and IT security professional, the business value in workforce identity transformation is enabling business continuity through digital transformation efforts that allow the enterprise to adapt to a rapidly changing environment while maintaining workforce productivity and security.

Increasing the Speed of Business
Maintaining Workforce Productivity
Securing the Enterprise

Increasing the Speed of Business
The time and energy involved in maintaining legacy systems can steal your IT teams away from the work of supporting the business. Workforce transformation centered on modern IAM solutions frees your IT teams to drive digital transformation success by:
- Leveraging standards, reducing the need for costly and time-consuming customization
- Accelerating cloud adoption to increase efficiency and reduce costs
- Empowering app teams with self-service capabilities that speed time to market and minimize reliance on IT
- Automating identity into the DevOps tool chain
Maintaining Workforce Productivity
Your IT teams can enable the productivity of increasingly remote employees while freeing time up to focus on high-business value projects by:
- Enabling one-click access to resources with SSO
- Using dynamic, adaptive authentication to streamline access and step up authentication requirements only when warranted
- Establishing a central IAM operating portal with delegated administration so users can help themselves
- Being relieved from low-value, manual tasks like password resets and fulfilling application onboarding requests so they can focus on strategic priorities
Securing the Enterprise
As company-wide work from home mandates become the norm, organizations are looking to establish an identity-based perimeter to balance enterprise security with employee productivity. Moving to a Zero Trust approach can empower IT teams to secure the business without adding unnecessary friction to the employee workflow by:
- Putting MFA everywhere, so you can reduce password risk
- Relying on context and risk signals to ensure users are who they claim to be
- Imposing least-access privilege to minimize insider threats and ensure only the right people have access to the right resources
- Consolidating and rationalizing legacy systems to reduce your overall attack surface

What IT Executives Care About

As part of any workforce transformation, IT executives are looking to implement Zero Trust security strategies that protect the organization, enable remote employees to remain efficient and support digital transformation efforts.

Architecting for Zero Trust

With more employees accessing resources from outside of the office, the corporate network is no longer a reliable security measure. Using a Zero Trust framework can help increase your enterprise’s security posture by:

Laying the foundation for an identity-centric approach to secure a borderless enterprise
Leveraging intelligence, context and risk signals for greater confidence in giving access to resources

Enabling Workforce Productivity

Achieving digital transformation success requires supporting your increasingly remote workforce to maintain productivity. Workforce transformation propels digital transformation by:

Making digital resources more accessible across your business so your workforce is able to work efficiently and effectively
Empowering IT teams to support transformation efforts rather than handling mundane tasks like password resets and lockouts

Increasing Business Agility

IT executives see IT as an enabler of rapid business model pivots that can keep the enterprise steps ahead of the competition. Workforce transformation increases agility by:

Utilizing cloud, DevOps, APIs and automation to speed up time to market
Freeing up teams from supporting legacy systems so they can focus on high-impact business improvements that move the needle

Architecting for Zero Trust
Enabling Workforce Productivity
Increasing Business Agility

Architecting for Zero Trust
With more employees accessing resources from outside of the office, the corporate network is no longer a reliable security measure. Using a Zero Trust framework can help increase your enterprise’s security posture by:
- Laying the foundation for an identity-centric approach to secure a borderless enterprise
- Leveraging intelligence, context and risk signals for greater confidence in giving access to resources
Enabling Workforce Productivity
Achieving digital transformation success requires supporting your increasingly remote workforce to maintain productivity. Workforce transformation propels digital transformation by:
- Making digital resources more accessible across your business so your workforce is able to work efficiently and effectively
- Empowering IT teams to support transformation efforts rather than handling mundane tasks like password resets and lockouts
Increasing Business Agility
IT executives see IT as an enabler of rapid business model pivots that can keep the enterprise steps ahead of the competition. Workforce transformation increases agility by:
- Utilizing cloud, DevOps, APIs and automation to speed up time to market
- Freeing up teams from supporting legacy systems so they can focus on high-impact business improvements that move the needle

Quantifying the Value to Your Business

Beyond highlighting the benefits and capabilities workforce transformation provides, you can quantify the value of transforming workforce identity to provide proof of measurable business value.

Chapter 6

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