User Provisioning - The Ultimate Guide

Can you imagine requesting access in your organization constantly whenever you need access to applications? That would be a major hindrance to productivity if done manually.

On the other hand, by ensuring that everyone has access to appropriate tools at the time they need them, people can work efficiently without any hassle. 

In this article, we’ll discuss why automating user provisioning is critical and how Zluri simplifies this process.

Imagine an enterprise full of people, all working towards a common goal, each with their own unique role to play. There's the team of employees hustling to complete tasks, the managers strategizing and organizing, and the clients interacting with the company. In order for all of these individuals to perform their duties efficiently, they must have access to the necessary resources on the company's network. 

Users are the heart of any enterprise, no doubt. And to guarantee that your staff has access to tools required to do their job, user provisioning is a crucial step. It eases the integration between business users, IT administrators and HR professionals, helping employees gain access to information as necessary. 

Furthermore, user provisioning provides a layer of security around your data by ensuring that only authorized personnel can access it.

Before we dive into the purpose of user provisioning in an enterprise, let’s understand what user provisioning exactly means. 

What is user provisioning?

User provisioning is the process of providing users access to the required applications with the right level of permission and at the right time. 

These users do not necessarily have to be employees of your organization. Users include consultants, contractors, freelancers, and vendors who require access to your company's applications.

It essentially relates to the administration of user rights and privileges. User provisioning is one of the many identity management processes—the others being deprovisioning of accounts, workflow automation, delegated administration, password synchronization, and self-service password reset.

Advantages of automating user provisioning for enterprises

Suppose you want to stay ahead of the curve. In that case, it's time to embrace the dynamic nature of the modern workplace and adopt automated user provisioning as a key element of your user lifecycle management strategy. 

Not convinced yet? Check out the advantages of automated user provisioning for enterprises:

1. Boost the productivity of IT teams and employees

Automating user provisioning can help enhance the productivity of IT teams and employees who need access by minimising the time spent correcting permission issues.

Without the right user provisioning tool, it is challenging to provide IT teams access to crucial apps and files swiftly.

This, on the other side, causes delays and decreased productivity for employees. It is difficult and time-consuming to overcome a problem if an employee needs access to specific resources to finish a project but does not have the required rights. 

These kinds of problems can be avoided, and it can be guaranteed that staff members have access to the resources they require to finish their work by employing tools that automate user provisioning and help you enforce access management policies. 

In short, automating user provisioning helps to speed up work and lessen the chance of delays brought on by permission problems.

2. Helps reduce risks by integrating IT and HR systems

In most organizations, provisioning comes into place majorly during these two events: 

• onboarding new employees

• mid-lifecycle changes during the tenure of employee 

  • promotion

  • change in department 

  • change in geography 

Generally whenever these events happen, HRMS are the most up-to-date system having information about employees. However, provisioning is the responsibility of IT teams–and they rely on their own systems, not HRMS.

Here comes the importance of automating user provisioning. User provisioning tools bring in sync the HR and IT teams and their systems. This ensures that users only have access to necessary tools with the right level of permission.

Some tools like Zluri Lifecycle Management go one step further by giving information on SaaS usage to the IT teams. This ensures that IT teams have visibility into what data employees share with these third-party tools.

3. Enable auditability and control 

User provisioning systems help you audit the users' entitlements. So, you be assured that only the right users have access to the right tools and required permissions.

This eliminates the risk of over-provisioning, thus helping you stay compliant and secure.

Many tools also allow you to monitor users for suspicious activity. Furthermore, some tools like Zluri can automatically deprovision risky users based on set rules. 

Benefits of automating user provisioning

The following phases in a user's lifecycle can be used to clarify the goal of user provisioning:

• Smooth onboarding: Newly hired users need to set up their user profiles with permissions according to their roles and hierarchical positions. To carry this out, user accounts must be created, access to the proper systems must be granted, the required training and materials must be made available, and any further onboarding procedures must be provided as necessary. 
  By automating user provisioning, employees get a very smooth onboarding experience as they have all the tools they need to do their job on day 1. This also ensures they have a seamless transition into the company, allowing them to speed up quickly and perform their tasks without any issues. 

• Hassle-free user transitions: User provisioning enables users to make a smooth transition by granting them access rights that fit their new role. User provisioning is mainly concerned with these phases: change in department or geography and promotion. 
  For instance, if an email marketing specialist is promoted to a managerial role, they may need more permission and probably, some additional tools to gain visibility over their team. Automating user provisioning ensures that users are granted the appropriate access to their new location, role, title or department.

• Better collaboration during one-off access requirements: One-off user access provisioning is used for situations in which someone needs temporary access to a particular file or directory or for a contractor who will be working on a specific project. 
  This kind of access provisioning should be handled quickly and thoroughly, with clear policies for removing them after the event. Unless you automate this process, it is nearly impossible to do it efficiently.

• Risk-free offboarding: The termination process should be fast so employees who depart the company cannot access sensitive data. It is important that you revoke access before it becomes a potential risk.
  Imagine a user joining a competing organization and having access to your CRM. Scary! Isn't it?

How Zluri helps automate user provisioning

Now that we have discussed the significance of automating user provisioning, we will explain how it actually works in action using the example of Zluri. 

Zluri aids IT administrators in automating provisioning and deprovisioning and lessens the tedious, manual process of giving and revoking access to SaaS apps. 

It has purpose-built workflows to automate provisioning and deprovisioning during employees' onboarding, offboarding and mid-lifecycle changes.

What separates Zluri User Provisioning platform from the other tools available in the market is:

1. Intelligent recommendations engine: Zluri's engine understands how apps are used in your business. It not only suggests what app a user will need but can also automate in-app actions when creating provisioning workflows. 
For example, 

• Add a user to a particular group in Google admin.

• Add user to selected private Slack group based on their title and department 

• Greet an employee in a Slack channel with a custom welcome message on their new role

2. Risk-free deprovisioning: Zluri is the most secure tool for revoking access from SaaS account after an employee leaves. 

• Using Zluri, deprovisioning is as simple as clicking a button and taking care of business. These are the following four actions that take place:

• To start, it remove all authentication from the various devices. Therefore, if a user is signed in on three different devices, that user will not be able to use any of those devices to access the app.

• After that, it either transfer the data to another user or make a copy of the data to keep as a backup. Therefore, no data is lost, even if canceling access is a simple process from the administrator's perspective.

• In addition, Zluri navigates back to the program and deletes the user because the data has been moved on to its intended destination.

• Last but not least, it remove the SSOs access as well.

With such advanced capabilities, you can say goodbye to the time-consuming, tedious tasks of user provisioning and deprovisioning. 

So why waste time when Zluri can revolutionize your user provisioning process? Make the smart choice and upgrade to Zluri today!