It is the responsibility of organizations to protect both their employees and businesses from falling victim to a single point of failure. Baking guardrails into business operations takes the onus off employees by providing safeguards against costly mistakes, says Daniel Chechik, chief information security officer at WalkMe.
An employee accidentally deletes data and crashes a major social media platform, and a contractor unintentionally deletes files, delaying 9,600 flights and canceling 1,300. In an era in which ‘there’s an app for that,’ recent headlines remind us that we are truly only human after all.
In today’s world of technological sophistication, it’s hard to believe that esteemed organizations – knowingly or unknowingly – stand on systems that teeter on a single point of failure – often resting on a human being. A single point of failure is a possible risk posed by a flaw in the design, implementation, or configuration of a process that could bring down the whole operation.
Employees have become the scapegoat in these situations, but it simply doesn’t make sense to create a system in which one individual has the ability to suspend operations due to one mistake or intentional sabotage. It is the responsibility of organizations to protect both their employees and businesses from becoming a single point of failure. Baking guardrails into business operations takes the onus off employees by providing safeguards against potential “headline news” types of mistakes. Here are three ways organizations can protect their businesses and employees while providing an excellent employee experience.
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Assign Permissions Carefully Backed by the Right Technology
Build your organization with clear roles and responsibilities. Give the minimum permission that each role needs for their day-to-day job. In other words, provide permissions on a “need to know” basis. If they don’t need it, don’t give it. This is the first step in minimizing the risk against costly employee mishaps.
Large enterprises have, on average, 187 business applications deployed, according to Okta’s latest annual Business at Work report. It is no surprise that there is a lot of work being done in disparate systems and applications, so managing permissions to each application and within each application is essential. In order to do this, you need an HR system with clearly defined roles for every employee, which will serve as a single source of truth for employee access. An identity management system or single sign-on technology, such as Okta, ensures that the right employees have access to the right applications – which is always the least amount of permissions needed to do their job.
Clear Internal Communications and Policies
Employees should understand which applications they have access to and how to use those applications to accomplish their goals. Internal policies should be clearly communicated to employees during the onboarding process and readily available in a knowledge base as to why certain individuals have certain permissions and others do not. There should be no exceptions to stated permission policies. Everyone must go through the same process of requesting permission, since roles evolve and IT professionals must keep up with these evolutions in order to ensure business continuity. These policies are standard best practices for enterprises and should also be applied to organizations of all sizes.
Nevertheless, it’s not enough to have the right permissions and policies in place. Not every application allows admins to assign permission for very specific actions within it and there are many reasons why certain employees need to access only certain functions within applications. For example, an Engineer on the R&D team should have access to a recruiting application such as Lever or Greenhouse to refer friends or former colleagues to apply for open jobs, but they should not be able to change job requirements on open roles. These applications are designed with that in mind, but there are countless less clear-cut examples.
Think of how much better the experience is to receive a personalized message when trying to perform an unauthorized activity, with the guidelines provided in the flow of work on why you don’t have access and what you can do to request that particular access. The alternative is to try and figure it out, likely with frustration as to why you don’t have access – in other words wasting time and breeding distrust between the employee and their employer.
Create an Ecosystem of Stability and Security
With work spanning across more and more business applications, there has been a rise in digital friction, an abundance of complex digital workflows and administrative tasks that eat away at employee productivity and negatively impact organizations and the employee experience. When toggling between applications and context switching back and forth, employees are even more likely to make mistakes. As human beings, we all make mistakes from time to time, but it’s up to business leaders and IT professionals to set employees up for success by optimizing their digital employee experience.
To address this digital friction and master complex digital workflows, organizations are turning to a digital adoption platform (DAP) as a key element of their digital adoption strategy. DAPs provide customized on-screen guidance and automation to walk employees through workflows across applications while providing aggregate user analytics to continuously improve the user experience. They significantly reduce digital friction, ensure that users are actually using their digital tools the right way, and also provide built-in safeguards against application misuse and mistakes.
See more: Security in an Increasingly Distributed-Workforce World
When it comes to security, the right DAP can be used as an extra guard to any application or cross-application workflow. For example, a DAP can be used to add change management procedures on sensitive operations across multiple applications or hide certain actions from even being visible on the screens of those who do not have permission for those actions. DAPs can also be used to help employees automatically report security risks such as email phishing or even for annual security and compliance procedures. These changes are implemented in the flow of work and without the need for dev resources.
The current volatility in the global economy has created an environment in which many organizations need to complete the same tasks with fewer resources, so having these checks and balances in place is more important than ever. It is well within the responsibilities of business leaders and compliance and security officers to provide a safe environment for employees with the appropriate guidance to complete their work as expected while accounting for human errors and risks. Keeping permissions, policies and digital adoption strategy top of mind, organizations can focus on multiple points of success by inherently eliminating any single points of failure.
How are you restricting single points of failure to ensure business success? Share with us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. We’d love to know!
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