Lifecycle Management

  • 4 min read

User Provisioning - A Comprehensive Guide to Manage User’s Lifecycle

Tathagata Chakrabarti

23rd February, 2023

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User provisioning is critical in maintaining the security and integrity of an organization's information system. This prevents unauthorized access to company resources. Further, it streamlines onboarding new employees, contractors, or partners, allowing them to quickly and securely access the resources needed to perform their job duties. 

User provisioning has become challenging with the rise of hybrid work and the increased use of cloud-based services. This is because third-party providers often manage these services, making it difficult to control user access.

In addition, IT teams' manually provisioning users may consume time and be prone to human errors. Further, inappropriate access can impact employee productivity and ultimately affect the organization's overall ROI.

Therefore, effective user provisioning is essential for businesses to have control over access to their systems and ensure it is granted only to authorized users. It outlines the steps to be taken when creating and managing user accounts. 

Also, the user provisioning process should include continuously reviewing users' access to ensure it remains appropriate. It will help your business to stay secure and protect sensitive information. 

Now, let us know more about user provisioning, why, and how to automate it.

What is User Provisioning?

User provisioning is an integral part of user lifecycle management. It allows the IT teams to create and modify accounts of the users across the IT environment in the organization. 

When an employee joins the organization, the primary step is to create a new account and profile for the employee. Then, depending on the nature of the organization, it involves the collaboration of HR, IT, and other department heads to grant access to all the necessary applications, accounts, and information that the employee needs to perform their daily tasks.

Moreover, the process of user provisioning gets difficult in cases of promotion, change in role, etc. In these situations, there are changes in their access requirements and the need to adopt or quit specific applications. Furthermore, organizations may bring in temporary employees, such as contractual employees, who require temporary access to the tools.

As a result, proper user provisioning is essential for smooth business operations. Multiple reasons make this process necessary, of which 2 are mentioned below.

• Work efficiency: Employees can work more efficiently when they have the appropriate access to resources. This allows them to access the necessary data for their tasks, making their work more manageable and less time-consuming. Additionally, the right tools can simplify their workload.

• Eliminate security and compliance risks: To mitigate security threats from outsiders and insiders, the organization must restrict unauthorized access to sensitive information. This not only helps to protect the organization's assets but also ensures compliance with relevant regulations. 
  
  For example, if your company deals with health-related information, you must comply with HIPAA security frameworks. Allowing multiple users to access this type of information could result in hefty penalties if an audit is conducted and make the organization non-compliant with HIPAA.

As the organization grows, the number of users increases, making the provisioning process more complex. However, an automated provisioning system can help manage this complexity by streamlining the process and reducing the workload of IT teams. Further, automating this process can help organizations save time and reduce the risk of errors while improving security and compliance.

Some of the benefits of automated user provisioning are as follows:

• User provisioning increases employee productivity and reduces the workload.

• It eliminates security threats when the right access is given to the right users.

• It improves the user experience and saves time.

• With user provisioning systems, users get appropriate access quickly, minimize within a short time, and minimize the requests made to IT support teams.

• A centralized view of users and their account access makes the audit process easy and helps you stay compliant.

Now, let's see how you can automate your user provisioning process.

How Can You Automate User Provisioning?

For automating user provisioning, solutions can be utilized to streamline the process of managing user access. These solutions manage the entire lifecycle of users in the organization. With automated user provisioning tools, IT teams can provide better service and support more efficiently and cost-effectively.

Automating provisioning eliminates the need for manual work, saving time and reducing potential human errors. It also streamlines the tedious onboarding process, improving the user experience and productivity.

Automated provisioning grants employees proper access to applications and resources based on their role and permission levels without requiring manual processing and approval of access requests.

An automated solution, like a user lifecycle management solution, will simplify the lifecycle management of the users. It will create workflows with predefined actions, such as granting appropriate access to required tools, managing and deleting user accounts, and more.

The solutions allow IT administrators to create and manage user accounts and control access to different systems and applications. They also provide a single control point for managing password policies and other security settings.

Moreover, once you have chosen a method to automate user provisioning, you should develop a clear process for creating and managing user accounts and establish roles and responsibilities for different team members. This will ensure that the process is efficient, consistent, and secure.

Finally, it is important to regularly review and update your user provisioning process to ensure that it is still effective, efficient, and secure. This will help you identify and address any issues that may arise and keep pace with changes in your organization's systems and applications.

Use Zluri to Automate Provisioning & Manage User Lifecycle

Zluri is a SaaS management solution that helps to automate the onboarding process, streamlining and simplifying it for IT teams. With Zluri, you can create workflows to onboard new hires with a few clicks. This includes access to necessary software and systems and training and onboarding materials.

You can add multiple users and various apps per requirements in a workflow with suitable actions. These workflows can be "run" immediately or saved as a "playbook" for future use. Also, these playbooks can be modified or removed as per your requirement.

For example, you can create a playbook for the Marketing Manager with Slack, Trello, Mailchimp, Google Workspace, and Semrush. Then, if a new hire joins, you can add users and send them the onboarding tasks with a single click, so they can complete and start using the applications.

Moreover, Zluri gives app recommendations and in-app suggestions. Further, you can automate the complete onboarding process by setting rules and conditions.

Automating user provisioning with Zluri can help organizations save time, reduce the risk of errors, and enhance security and compliance. You can automate creating, updating, and deleting user accounts and associated access privileges by using centralized identity management systems, application-specific provisioning tools, or third-party identity management solutions.

For more information on user provisioning, just request a demo.

About the author

Tathagata Chakrabarti

Tathagata is a Technical Content Writer with 4+ of experience in the SaaS industry. He has a keen eye for research and understanding macro trends in the SaaS & AI-based technology space. He has worked across several marketing & strategy roles in various domains like banking, e-commerce, and education sectors. In his leisure time, Tathagata is a full-time PC gamer.