Ron is an IT administrator at a rapidly growing company in New York. Each day, Ron's inbox gets flooded with hundreds of emails asking for access to different systems and resources. Ron has to create and assign accounts to new employees who have joined and delete accounts of those who have left the organization. Ron is tired of manually creating, modifying, transferring, and deleting all these accounts and permissions. After constantly performing these tasks, Ron does not any have energy or motivation left to do the IT administrator work he was originally assigned to do. He has become unintentionally negligent and risks the organization's network health and security.
Companies like Ron's that use manual user provisioning and de-provisioning processes risk a lot of competitive advantage when compared to their competitors who have employed an automated identity and access management (IAM) solution and make use of template-based provisioning and de-provisioning. By continuing to use manual processes, companies like Ron's have to bear the heavy brunt of security risks from human errors and will lack a transparent view into their corporate IT environment. They also tend to waste a substantial amount of human resources on tasks that can be automated. Incorporating an IAM solution into their organization can be the game changer for them, helping them close the gap on their competition.
User provisioning refers to the creation, modification, management, and maintenance of new user accounts and giving them the necessary permissions and authorizations to access corporate resources as per their role. A strong user provisioning process is essential for any organization to ensure that new users face no setbacks when getting set up with their roles and positions, in effect making them more productive and efficient.
There are three commonly used types of user provisioning seen in organizations worldwide. They are:
This form of user provisioning lets the employees request and manage access to required resources through password-based systems. This method lessens the work required from an administrator and accelerates the user provisioning process, but is still very much dependent on humans.
In companies using a workflow-based user account provisioning process, users don't make direct requests for access to required systems and information but instead need to be signed off for access. For example, a new employee would require their manager to grant them permission to access certain enterprise resources and apps to use them.
This kind of provisioning is done by implementing an IAM solution in the organization. This is the fastest and most secure type of provisioning possible. The IAM solution automates everything related to access, permissions, and workflows based on a set of rules. These rules are set based on organizational needs and have the added benefit of providing valuable data on what each user is doing in the IT ecosystem.
User de-provisioning generally refers to the revocation and withdrawal of permissions and access to various enterprise apps, accounts, and networks—typically when an employee leaves the organization. It is essentially the opposite of user provisioning and frees up company resources such as ports, accounts, licenses, physical assets, certificates, and storage for other uses. This process ensures employees don't retain any access to corporate resources once they leave the organization. Just like user provisioning, user de-provisioning can also be automated using an IAM solution. Automating user de-provisioning makes it faster, more secure, and less prone to errors, ensuring the company's security and confidentiality remain intact.
Template-based provisioning and de-provisioning is when customizable templates are used to simplify and standardize the onboarding and offboarding of employees in an organization. Templates are highly effective when it comes to creating and modifying accounts for users who share identical properties and attributes. A template can also be used to customize workflows to de-provision employees who are leaving and lock them out of the organization's resources.
These are some of the benefits of deploying a template-based user provisioning/de-provisioning system:
Automated template-based provisioning systems can provide your organization with high levels of transparency into your employees' life cycles. It also drastically reduces the time employees have to wait to receive the permissions and authorizations they need to be productive, which saves time and money by reducing unproductive work time.
Using an automated template-based de-provisioning process also improves productivity, resource utilization, and security by ensuring that every obsolete and duplicate account is deleted and removed from the organization's IT environment.
