Google Workspace Adds Flexible Access Request Automation for Approval Workflows

New Google Directory capabilities route access request approvals based on department, cost centre, site and reporting line across hybrid identity estates

Organisations running Google Workspace can now automate the access requests that fall outside an identity provider’s design scope — including approvals that depend on the requester’s site, business entity, department, contract type and who owns the resource being requested.

The challenge with access requests isn’t the task itself — it’s the context. Zenphi allows to dynamically provide the workflows with the information they need to make those decisions automatically.”

— Vahid Taslimi, CEO at Zenphi

The capability arrives in the September platform release from Zenphi, a no-code workflow automation platform for Google Workspace, and addresses a gap most identity tooling was never designed to close: the access requests that arrive after an account already exists.
Directory sync creates the account, adds the groups associated with the employee’s job title and assigns a licence. However, the employee requests that follow are not covered by this functionality.

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What would typically be requested? Access to a shared drive outside someone’s standard role. Permission to create a Group for a project rather than a department. Delegated access while a colleague is on leave. Elevated permissions for a fixed period.
Each of these real-life requests depends on circumstances that could not have been predicted at provisioning time. As a result, they tend to be treated as edge cases and resolved manually.

A poll of IT leaders attending a Zenphi webinar earlier this month reflected this. 60% said they have a ticketing system in place, but IT still performs the actual work by hand. A further 23% reported having no formal process at all. Only 7% described the process as fully automated.
The same group was asked how many such requests their team handles manually each week. A third said more than fifty. In other words, even when request volumes are high, many companies still do not see a practical way to automate this process.

An updated Google Directory — Get User first-class action, added by Zenphi to the core platform capabilities this September, now returns flattened tokens for Department, Cost Centre, Direct Manager, Employee ID and Desk Location.
These are the attributes that often determine who needs to approve a request and at what level. Exposing them as direct tokens means an access request workflow can branch on this information without custom parsing. The same request type can therefore be routed to a local manager at one site, to both a manager and a data owner at another, or through an additional approval step where a particular cost centre or business entity requires one.

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The same context can drive shared drive permission management, Google Group membership and Gmail delegation, where the appropriate level of access depends not only on the resource being requested, but also on who is making the request.
With this update, access requests submitted to IT no longer need to be anticipated at the provisioning stage or treated as manual exceptions. They can be automated dynamically based on the employee’s actual organisational context at the time of the request.

“The challenge with access requests isn’t the task itself — it’s the context,” said Vahid Taslimi, CEO at Zenphi. “This release gives workflows the information they need to make those decisions automatically, with the right guardrails in place.”

Zenphi is not a dedicated access control software or approval workflow software, however its IT operations automation workflows are used by organisations including Gordon Food Service, Google Cloud’s Customer Experience Center, Emerson College and others. Documented Zenphi implementations have reduced IT ticket volumes by 83% and cut administrative time spent on Google Admin tasks by up to 85%.

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