More organisations could be tacking the pain points of verifying employee credentials with existing technology.
The point was raised during a discussion between Gillian Jones, senior business development manager at Condatis, and Matt Fernandes, head of cloud security at ITC Secure at last week’s Think Digital Identity for Government event. There, the pair addressed how organisations can tackle staff mobility challenges using Microsoft Entra Verified ID.
With a verified ID, Fernandes said, instead of HR being forced to spend time verifying a potential employee’s identity, the candidate simply brings their verified identities with them. This could be something on their phone that proves that the DVLA has their driving licence for example.
“All HR needs to do is say, ‘okay, I need these three attributes, are they valid?’ The user then does their biometrics to say, ‘I’m happy for these bits of data to go to this company.’ And that’s it, done. Which means that onboarding, instead of taking weeks, takes seconds, minutes. And they can immediately get started on to the next part of the red tape, and the processes.”
The same can be used when an employee calls up an internal helpdesk with Entra Verified ID within an organisation’s Active Directory. “We’re adding another layer of trust into something that could be a privileged access or privilege escalation of something that would be remote,” said Fernandes.
Another scenario is when a new employee has to prove their skills and qualifications.
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“We can really support what is potentially a very cumbersome process,” said Jones. “We know that many people in heavily regulated industries, [and] we’ve seen doctors and nurses, they’ve got years, potentially, of qualifications that they’ve got to prove. You can’t be walking about with a massive ring binder all the time. You need to be able to have this in a way that you can store, you can share, and also you know that you’re doing that in a trusted environment.”
The benefits, they said, were that government organisations can streamline their onboarding process and cut administration time, reducing the cost of potential security incidents, increasing employee productivity and empowering staff to do the jobs they are hired to do.
Evolution, not revolution
On Entra Verified ID, Jones stressed Microsoft’s huge install base of customers. “We’re not saying to everybody to rip and replace anything. It’s not that at all. It’s how can you extend, how can you future proof and how can you look to what comes next? As standards are evolving, as we’re looking at these huge projects which will be citizen related, what are the things that we can do now … so that they can extend out into the future?
“This is evolution, not revolution,” she added. “We’re not expecting people to start with all of these big complex problems. Start with the ones that are more solvable, that can be resolved today by using the technology.”
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