Pairing IGA With ITSM: How to Integrate tenfold With Your Helpdesk Solution

In its broadest sense, IT Service Management (ITSM) refers to all activities an organization engages in to plan, build and maintain a functioning IT environment. The goal of IT Service Management is to provide end users with the technologies they need to do their jobs. ITSM acts as a business enabler, creating and managing the essential infrastructure required for large enterprise networks.

In a narrower sense, IT Service Management refers to a category of software solutions that help organizations govern, execute and track these activities. Most workers associate ITSM solutions primarily with the ticket system that allows them to raise issues or request changes from the IT team. In turn, IT departments rely on this ticket queue to prioritize their troubleshooting efforts. However, ITSM platforms include a lot of features that go beyond support tickets.

ITSM Features:

Platforms for Identity Governance & Administration automate large parts of the on/offboarding process: creating accounts for new hires, adding them to groups and roles, assigning licenses for cloud and business apps – even granular, object-level permissions.

With role-based access and user lifecycle management, IGA completes provisioning tasks in seconds that previously kept your helpdesk busy for hours. This degree of automation eliminates a lot of busywork for your IT team, freeing them up focus on other tickets or advance strategic initiatives.

However, not all onboarding steps can be automated. Certain tasks, like setting up a new laptop, always require an IT admin to get involved. This is where ITSM comes in: Providing fresh hardware to users is the type of request that organizations typically manage through their helpdesk portal. Your support team receives a ticket, complete the task and close the ticket. Done.

Identity Governance and IT Service Management work towards the same goal of enabling seamless access to IT resources, but they generally deal with different problems. A user needs to be added to a project folder? An IGA solution with a self-service portal for access requests can fix that in a snap. A broken monitor or network outage stops you from working? Definitely a case for the help desk.

But for closely connected tasks such as on- and offboarding, the ideal approach is for your IGA and ITSM to work together. For example, your IGA solution can create all the accounts for a new user, then ping your ITSM to start the process of setting them up with any hardware or physical resources intended for their role.

With direct integration between both platforms, your Identity Governance solution can create tickets in your ITSM portal whenever an admin needs to get involved and then trigger follow-up workflows as soon as a manual task is marked as completed.

This further streamlines provisioning by removing many common points of friction for IT teams: Fewer email chains, fewer delays, fewer chances for misunderstandings. Add in an HR data import to track workforce changes and the whole onboarding chain runs seamlessly the moment a new hire is added into your HR software.

The onboarding pipeline with full HR, IGA and ITSM integration:

Both IGA and ITSM address critical needs. Together, they ensure that IT systems remain operational and are accessible to the right people. Given this, many organizations rely on a combination of IGA and ITSM to manage digital privileges as well as physical assets and in-person support.

However, the close relationship between ITSM and IGA can also create problems. Any time two different systems are used to manage the same users and resources, you risk creating parallel processes – increasing complexity, splitting information between two platforms and making it harder to track progress.

The biggest advantage of seamless IGA and ITSM integration is that it allows you to avoid exactly that risk. Both platforms are automatically kept in sync and always work off of up-to-date information. This eliminates the need to manually track and update progress across two platforms.

Advantages of IGA and ITSM integration:

As a no-code solution for governing identities and access, tenfold is focused on making setup and integration as easy as possible. This includes out-of-the-box support for many widely-used ITSM solutions such as Jira, TOPdesk, ServiceDesk Plus and Matrix42 Service Desk.

Setting up these connectors is as simple as installing them from our plugin library and providing the credentials needed to interface with their API. Settings for ticket creation, type, status and naming conventions can all be managed directly from tenfold’s UI.

Once the plugin is installed, you can create tickets as part of any action tenfold, from automated lifecycle changes to self-service requests made through our self-service portal. On the other hand, if you need to trigger workflows within tenfold from your ITSM, our REST API allows you to do just that.

From local accounts to cloud services and business apps, tenfold provides your users with accounts and privileges they need. But onboarding is not just a digital process. For laptops, phones, access tokens and other physical resources, connecting tenfold to your ITSM platform makes it easy to stay on top of manual provisioning steps.

Create a unified on- and offboarding pipeline, incorporate manual tasks into automated workflows and track access privileges alongside physical assets. With out-of-the-box integration for the apps you use – from ITSM to ERP and HR portals – centralized Identity Governance has never been easier.

Get started today with a personal demo of tenfold. This guided tour of our platform is the perfect opportunity to discuss your use case and integration questions with one of our experts.