If you’re a Zoom customer you might have received an email about your licenses this week, as a big change to their licensing model, quietly announced last year, goes into effect. Going forward, the free Zoom Basic tier available for enterprise customers—which allowed users to host meetings up to 40 minutes long—will become “Zoom Meetings Basic” and limited to only one free license per ten paid licenses. Other uses will be limited to “Zoom Workplace Basic” and will be allowed to join meetings, but not host or schedule them.
For many Zoom customers, this presents a problem: how to manage the large group of employees who don’t regularly meet with external people, but do still need to host the occasional meeting. Traditional IAM tools leave you stuck choosing between two sub-optimal approaches:
- Buy more paid Zoom licenses so that all employees can host meetings when needed, even if that isn’t very often.
- Have employees manually request access to a meetings-enabled license when they want to host meetings.
Either approach creates increased cost, either paid directly to Zoom, or indirectly in time spent manually assigning and reassigning a small pool of licenses, and lost productivity and opportunity while employees wait around for approval to schedule a meeting.
Better approaches are available through the practice of Autonomous Identity, a modern approach to Identity leveraging smart, adaptive access policies and automation to securely provide access to employees when needed, and remove it when not needed. We built Lumos to be the first Autonomous Identity platform, to discover all apps and manage access on auto-pilot.
Let’s have a look at two ways Lumos can help you optimize your approach to Zoom’s new licensing model.
Method 1 - Instant zero-touch access requests through the AppStore.
For employees who only need to host meetings a few times a year, the most efficient approach is to allow employees to request and instantly receive a paid Zoom license for a limited time frame. This way, employees don’t need to wade through a time-consuming manual process to schedule a meeting, and a pool of unused licenses always remains available.
To achieve this, all we need to do is set up a simple pre-approval rule for Zoom. In this example, we’ll allow any employee to instantly receive access to a “Zoom Basic - Meetings” license, but only for 7 days.
Now, an employee only needs to select Zoom from the Lumos AppStore and request access. The license will be instantly granted, and automatically removed after seven days, to ensure that there is always a pool of licenses available for ad hoc meetings.
Method 2 - Automatically remove unused licenses with inactivity workflows
For many SaaS apps, Lumos can monitor use of specific entitlements, like creating a Zoom meeting. To ensure that employees don’t indefinitely retain licenses they don’t need, you can set up an automated inactivity workflow in Lumos.
This workflow automatically detects if an account has not scheduled a meeting in the last 30 days, and downgrades users to the free tier of Zoom. For other situations you also have the option of completely removing access to the app.
Autonomous Identity boosts efficiency and security without sacrificing productivity.
By applying both of the above strategies to your provisioning, you can create a stable, secure and predictable deployment of any app, with a core group of permanent licenses, monitored to make sure they are really needed, and a supplementary group of ad hoc licenses that can be seamlessly deployed when needed, and removed when not. No employee wastes time or loses an important opportunity because they can’t access a critical app, no unused licenses eat away at your bottom line, and no unnecessary access to apps and data sits around waiting to be picked up and misused by an attacker.
The promise of Autonomous Identity is to create secure, seamless, least-privilege access, not just to one app, but across the hundreds of apps and systems your company uses daily. Autonomous Identity can manage both human and non-human identities, at a scale that legacy manual processes can’t come close to. To find out more about what Autonomous Identity can achieve for your organization, schedule a personalized demo.
