The traditional approach to user provisioning is through manual operations. This includes manually filling out predefined templates that require HR intervention and resources in the form of both time and money.
Organizations often fail to see the benefits associated with automation and cloud-based systems. If you are one with a similar blindfold, let us guide you through the money that you’ve been missing out on by overlooking the advantages of an automated provisioning system.
What Is User Provisioning
The chain of creating, managing, deleting, and disabling user accounts (mostly employees) is referred to as user provisioning. Irrespective of the mode of operation, user provisioning is an essential and trigger-sensitive action that promotes fair access, easy hire, faster promotion, and easier departures of users.
It takes IT departments at least 30-minutes or so to create and set up an account for a new user. The process may linger longer if the individuals responsible for it are preoccupied with something else. Yet the problem with manual user provisioning isn’t just about mismanagement of resources.
The responsible departments are required to update the access permissions and modify the user data in the event of promotions, transfers, or terminations. However, more often than not, outdated access permissions are overlooked and forgotten, presenting severe vulnerabilities to the whole business operation.
What Is Automated Provisioning System
In an automated provisioning system, the whole user provisioning complexity is handed over to automated algorithms. Automated systems, mostly cloud-based, take over the responsibility to set up accounts of new recruits and modify the existing ones.
User provisioning software works in three steps:
- In the case of new recruits, the automated provisioning system assigns them a new role in the organization and sets their accounts up.
- It specifies the access and permissions to the new recruit depending on their job role. A fresher working as an associate doesn’t need the same access as a senior technical consultant.
- Whenever a change occurs to any account, the permissions are automatically modified or revoked.
Automated provisioning systems empower your business to create, manage, and delete user accounts more easily in addition to several other additional benefits.
Advantages of Automatic Provisioning
The advantages of automatic provisioning systems are:
Assured Compliance Requirements for Each User
In a corporate organization, the prevention of unnecessary access is more important than granting permission. The complexity of granting and modifying access for new and old employees becomes a hassle once you reach a certain number of employees.
With every additional batch of employees, you either can hire new IT teams for smooth operation or fall back on an automated provisioning system that doesn’t need constant manual intervention.
The only input automated provisioning systems require are the details of modifications. If an employee was promoted to a certain role, either your HR team or another automated process needs to trigger the actions. The provisioning solution handles the rest.
In case an employee needs special access, you can review and verify it before it’s granted. Moreover, you can also set a time token that limits the days or months the employee is going to enjoy the privilege.
More Agile Than Traditional Provisioning
Automated provisioning systems seldom offer a new feature that manual user provisioning can’t imitate. But, automated provisioning is more agile than the manual approach. In this age of time scarcity, wasting valuable resources and business hours on creating an account for new recruiting neither sounds practical nor profitable.
In a manual user provisioning architecture, a template is provided to the IT department. The template usually includes the employee details, their job role, and access permissions. The structure is similar to long forms that you refrain from filling. For organizations large enough, it presents a huge resource and accuracy problem.
When hiring new employees, the IT team may get overwhelmed by the volume of work and its repeatability. They also need to review each employee individually to determine their level of access. Thus making errors and getting less productive by the hour.
Automated provisioning systems need to be configured only once. They can set up hundreds of accounts in minutes without breaking a sweat.
Transparent Data and Audit
As stated before, manual user provisioning leaves a probability of error and negligence throughout the organization. If a traditional system is embraced, the overlooked modifications present a transparency issue.
When auditing your access policies, you can’t be sure if the user account is updated or was overlooked as the operations aren’t consistent. You need to audit every single employee’s status in order to review their access. Moreover, if you require your employees to enjoy different levels of access despite being in the same job role, it may get more complicated.
With an automated provisioning system, the probability of error and negligence is voided. When auditing user policies, you only need to engage your resources to modify the access permissions that you want and not review each employee separately.
For example, you may now find it redundant to have an accounts manager access the data pool that was repurposed to suit the technical teams. With automated provisioning systems, you don’t need to revoke access for each employee in the accounts department. An access policy change will trigger the action for each employee automatically.
Increased Scalability
Cloud-based services typically are more scalable than traditional software. With the growth of IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS, the necessity of having an on-premises dedicated server has been minimized.
Having a dedicated server cripples the scalability of an organization. Upon maximizing the servers, you need to add more hardware and physical space to scale your operations. With “Everything As a Service” solutions, you can scale as much as you like without housing any kind of specialized hardware on-premises.
A Reduced Onboarding Cost per Operation
Initial investments with automated provisioning systems are greater than with manual software. But, the cost per operation–creating and managing accounts–is reduced to a substantial extent. The time and money you will save by engaging your valuable resources in other productive operations are considered when calculating cost per operation.
For scaling companies, the more you scale, the better cost per operation you achieve. At some point, the monetary benefits of adapting to an automated provisioning system outweigh the costs.
The Bottomline
The benefits associated with automated provisioning systems are essential for Monterey and federal reasons. Automated provisioning systems are more agile than manual ones. They comply with access policies more accurately. Despite being expensive, they reduce the cost per operation for organizations. A greater degree of trust and security is also achieved through automated provisioning systems.
