Could your holiday staff be posing a threat to IT services?

For many retailers, the holiday period brings with it a necessity to employ additional temporary staff to accommodate increased demand at that time of year. If you have had to bring in extra faces for the holiday season, you will know how difficult it is to fully train an expanded team to cope with the busiest period of the year. And come January, you may well be feeling the relief of operating with just the long-term, time-tested team members.

However, the legacy of the holiday staff may well last beyond the terms of their employment. If you have created temporary logins to the corporate IT infrastructure for the temporary team members, you may be compromising sensitive corporate information. Whilst their tenure within your company may have been temporary, their logins may continue to work and be used indefinitely.

A manual clear out of all temporary staff accounts may be a longwinded, exhausting and ultimately time-wasting endeavour. Deleting these accounts one-by-one is not the best use of IT personnel’s time, and is open to the possibility of human error.

At ProofID, we have created ARMS – an external lifecycle management tool, ensuring that all accounts are as temporary as the members of staff to whom they have been allocated. This means that accounts can be created for the duration of the temporary staff members’ stays, before removing their access rights as they leave the company.

Automating this process can help save significant time – especially for larger retailers and corporations which may be forced to significantly extend their workforce over the holiday period. Furthermore, this process can help remove the risk of human error removing or altering access rights of the wrong profiles (e.g. accounts with duplicate names and access).

As an off-the-shelf piece of software, ARMS has been developed for quick deployment – ensuring that all accounts are ready for the busy trade period. Furthermore, the simplified framework of the software allows for decentralized responsibilities – allowing individual units and stores to create new accounts as and when they are needed, vital during this busy period.

Companies and s using the ARMS software will be provided with all the tools to ensure that access is automatically removed from users at the end of their tenure. This offers a large amount of flexibility if certain accounts need to be extended, or others need to be removed before the scheduled date.

We offer a number of identity management solutions which have been designed to support a wide range of different IT infrastructures.