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Celebrating Transgender Day of Awareness

Posted on by Alexis Borchgrevink

March 31st is Transgender Day of Visibility (TDOV). This day is meant to celebrate the lives and contributions of trans people, while also drawing attention to the poverty, discrimination, and violence the community faces. 

As a trans woman in the tech space, Clarity’s CEO and Co-Founder Alexis Moyse hopes that the company will cause a ripple effect across the industry both technically and culturally. When she and Co-Founder and CTO Greg Glass launched the IGA startup in 2020, they knew immediately that they wanted to create an organization that offered a workplace environment that celebrated and encouraged employees to live their most authentic lives. 
 
On this day of Transgender Visibility, we sat down with Alexis to learn about her and her experience as a woman entrepreneur and CEO.

Alexis, in your own words, why is Transgender Day of Visibility such an important event? 

I know many people have strong opinions on whether to share personal details in the workplace. One of the main reasons why I feel compelled to share my life as a trans woman is because unlike many other trans people, I have been fortunate to have the continued support of my friends, loved ones, and colleagues. Clarity Security, our investors Silverton Partners & Alumni Ventures, and customers have all been tremendously respectful and accepting of me. 

However, thousands of highly intelligent, talented, and driven entrepreneurs who also happen to be gay, lesbian, bi, trans, or any other sexual orientation or gender are not afforded the same level of respect. They are repeatedly marginalized for simply existing. 

What is it like being a trans woman and the founder of a tech startup? 

I have been incredibly lucky to have a ton of internal support from our company, investors, and advisors. However, although there have been major strides made in diversity efforts within the industry there is still a lot of stigmas present. I get very anxious going into every customer call, onsite, or conference. I think that one reason for this is because as a founder, I don’t want people’s negative opinions of me to stand in the way of Clarity’s success. We are not yet at a place as a society where I will not receive judgmental looks, rude questions, or backlash for being trans and that definitely puts me on edge at times. 

What is Clarity doing to help support trans people? 

I wish we were in a position to do more, but as a startup our resources are limited. One thing we are very cognizant of is our culture. We put a lot of thought and effort towards creating and maintaining a workplace environment that is a safe space for all of our employees, including trans people and all members of the LGBTQ+ community.  

Once we are in a place to do so, we intend to donate a portion of our profits to The Trevor Project. I’ve also been thinking about life after Clarity, and I’m interested in eventually starting an investment firm that specifically supports LGBTQ+ entrepreneurs. 

What’s one of the biggest lessons you’ve learned during your transition? 

The biggest lesson that has carried over into my career is that most of the time the worst scenarios that run through your head prior to making a big leap are completely unfounded. People are much more supportive than you think and will often surprise you with their reactions to you coming out of the closet, making a big life change, or for some reason starting a company (at the beginning of a pandemic and in the midst of a slowly developing recession). 

What would you like to say to people who aren’t familiar with trans people? 

Something that I would like to stress with people who may not be familiar with trans people is that being trans carries a personal meaning and the outward expression of being trans exists on a spectrum. Like many things in life, from political beliefs to how much you enjoy a brussels sprouts, being trans and a person’s transition is a wide spectrum.  

For some trans people they may feel content with changing their name and pronouns.  

For others they feel they had to lie about who they were for decades and had to look at a reflection they did not recognize. So, when they come out it’s an explosion of change and at the end you may see almost no resemblance to how they previously presented. While that is hard to accept, the person you see is who they really are.  

If anything, these changes, large or small, should excite you because now you get to build an incredible friendship with a person who can finally be their genuine self. 

What is a common misconception you face as a trans woman? 

I think many people that haven’t personally met me expect me to look, act, and present a specific way because I am trans. They expect me not to listen to punk, wear jeans, hike, play sports, or go days without make up. I think they have this unintentional bias in their head based on pre-existing stereotypes that society places on men and women alike. I hope I can assuage that bias and help them understand there’s not a right or wrong way to be who you are. 

Thank you for taking the time to share your story and your experience. This is my favorite part of any interview, the rapid fire “get to know you”. 

Describe yourself in 1 word 
Gnar or Devoted 

Favorite color 
Navy 

Mountains or Oceans? 
Mountains! 

Favorite domain of security? 
I am morally obligated to say Identity, but my guilty pleasure is email security. Shout out to Proofpoint and Mimecast! 

What did you want to be when you grew up? 
Baseball player was my first dream, then a chef (which who knows what will happen after Clarity!) 

Favorite dessert 
Brownies. My partner cannot make them or I’ll eat an entire pan in a single day. 

Favorite hobby 
Rock climbing and hiking! Or playing every FROM SOFT game on repeat. 

What’s 1 song you could listen to on repeat until the heat death of the universe? 
Nausea by Jeff Rosenstock 

Favorite holiday? 
Probably Game 1 of the World Series Day. It may not be a holiday for everyone, but I certainly take that day off work. 

Improving Onboarding With Automated Lifecycle Management

Posted on by Stephanie Burns

Improving IGA within your organization can have a beneficial impact on business outcomes related to employee efficiency and talent retention.

Background

There aren’t many things more detrimental to new employee productivity than a slow and disjointed onboarding process. Ineffective onboarding can cause employees to lose trust in their employer organization and can also impact a company’s ability to hit revenue targets. But what causes onboarding processes to decline? Manual lifecycle management (LCM) processes can often lead to new employees waiting months for the access they need to do their job. 

Case in point, if your organization utilizes AWS, you’re likely familiar with how time-consuming it is to properly provision a user. For one customer, manual LCM processes resulted in a drawn-out onboarding process with new employees waiting months for access to AWS. If your organization relies heavily on support tickets, tribal knowledge, or struggles with operational bottlenecks then this situation may sound familiar to you. 

Why It’s Important for IT and Cybersecurity Teams to Help Improve Onboarding Experiences

But onboarding is HR’s problem; you may be thinking. Keep in mind that IT and Cybersecurity teams oversee the access rights granted to employees for the key business resources needed to do their jobs. End-users may not understand everything that goes into provisioning an identity, but they sure like to blame IT when they can’t access the software needed to do their job. Whether or not IT is the one holding up the process. 

In addition, employee threat awareness is critical to effective cybersecurity. If end-users lose faith in the effectiveness of the IT and Cybersecurity processes, they’re less likely to respect and adopt recommendations made by your group. If you are working to convince your organization to change business operations to better benefit security outcomes, it’s important that employees have full faith in your IT group.

One Customer’s Story

Effective IGA practices like automated LCM can significantly improve onboarding experiences. A great example of how automated LCM can improve onboarding processes and have a positive impact within your organization is how one customer used Clarity to fully provision new employees in minutes rather than months. This customer was responsible for managing over 750 websites, plus SEO and content creation for their customers. Their employees needed access to a multitude of applications, web environments, and more. Most of their internal processes were built to prioritize agility, precision, and speed. Except for managing access needs during new employee onboarding. Some new employees had to wait for over 2 months to be fully provisioned. Manual lifecycle management processes were making it almost impossible to provision new employees in a timely manner. In addition, the customer had regulatory requirements that mandated a specific approval process be followed before employee access could be provisioned. Very few hiring managers knew about the requirement, and so access would go un-provisioned for lengthy periods of time.  
 
Regardless of regulatory requirements, new hires shouldn’t have to wait months to have access to the resources they need to do their job. Like many other organizations, this customer relied on tickets to handle LCM access requests. A manager had to remember to submit a ticket for their new employee’s access. Then an IT professional had to manually review the ticket, log into multiple applications, grant the proper entitlements, and respond to the manager to get formal approval to meet the previously mentioned regulatory requirements. This process was slow, time-consuming, and left a lot of opportunity for error. What if the manager forgot to include several of the applications needed or what if their requests left a user overprovisioned? How does an organization maintain RBAC and enforce least privilege if there isn’t a way to easily reference entitlements based on roles?

The Solution

To solve this customer’s problem, we used a combination of Clarity’s dynamic role mining engine and automated LCM to help minimize the organization’s reliance on tickets and alleviate bottlenecks during onboarding. 

To get started, team members from Clarity worked alongside the customer’s IT Team to complete Identity Unification. This process automatically generated the customer’s RBAC structure using flexible org units and attribute mapping to ensure least privilege and risk minimization. Afterwards, Clarity’s customer success team trained the client’s IT and cybersecurity administrators on how touse drag-and-drop workflows to create a customized automated LCM approval process. Now, when a new identity is found in a source of truth, such as when a new employee is populated in an HR system, that identity is immediately provisioned and granted access based on the appropriate role. There was no longer a need for IT admins to log into multiple downstream applications to manually grant access, saving significant time and reducing the potential for error. 

As we mentioned earlier, there were certain access requests that required specific approval in order to meet regulatory requirements. For those instances, an additional custom LCM workflow was created to send daily notifications to reviewers until they approved or denied the request. Once access was approved, the identity was automatically provisioned. 

In Conclusion

Prior to Clarity Security, it wasn’t uncommon for a newly hired junior developer to be without their required access for two months. After implementing Clarity Security, all access is provisioned immediately after the employee is finalized in the HR system. This shift to automated LCM improved onboarding processes, reduced time and effort spent provisioning new identities, removed clunky operational processes, and better secured the customer’s application landscape.