Suppose you’re a corporate organization without an IAM ( identity and access management ). As a business without an IAM, it is often necessary to manually onboard hundreds of new employees. So, the question is, “How can you efficiently provide these hundreds of new hires with access to their respective systems and applications?” That’s where automated provisioning comes in handy.
Automating your provisioning process helps to prevent these situations and ensures provisioning (and de-provisioning) is handled efficiently, intelligently, and successfully. In this blog post, you’ll learn the automated provisioning meaning and how it’s utilized in identity and access management.
We’ll discuss the reasons behind automated provisioning in IT management and how it benefits businesses and system administrators.
What is Automated Provisioning?
Automated provisioning helps organizations manage access and rights to apps, the web, etc. As opposed to assigning rights manually to each user, auto-provisioning automatically assigns rights based on preset rules. For example, privileged access management (PAM) & identity & access management (IAM) utilize automated provisioning to onboard and onboard workers.
Automated provisioning is often incorporated as a component in IAM platforms because of its meaning, which allows system administrators and IT chiefs to formalize provisioning rights based on roles and company policies.
Why Does Your Company Need Automated Provisioning?
Many human resource departments manage employee and device access permissions through Active Directory (AD). With Active Directory, IT units have to operate, configure & install every cloud app and deliver to users manually when they join the organization.
SourceTeam members are distracted from more impactful projects by these tedious tasks and susceptible to human errors that ultimately limit business efficiency. Considering the change within a company, applications and tools must be provisioned and de-provisioned to employees as quickly and efficiently as possible.
In addition to speeding up user access and implementing changes based on predefined policies, automated provisioning helps monitor and audit processes and reduces risks associated with user lifecycle management.
How Does Automated Provisioning Work?
Using automated provisioning in identity governance and IAM, an organization’s resources and applications are automatically provisioned to workers. As opposed to traditional processes that require multiple stakeholders to approve, process, and activate/remove user access requests manually, it’s much more efficient.
But how exactly does it work? Based on their role and permission level, automated provisioning grants employees entry access to apps and resources via automated provisioning.
The identity management platform of your company will assign a role to new workers as soon as they start working there. Access permissions to applications are granted to workers based on their roles.
If employees switch roles or exit the company, their access will be automatically withdrawn. Using auto-provisioning, you can make, change, and delete user accounts as your institution changes. In addition, it confirms that the correct people have access rights.
Benefits of Automated Provisioning:
Below are some of the primary benefits of automated provisioning:
1. Simplify Onboarding
Your human resources department or IT department won’t have to handle onboarding anymore with automated provisioning. Instead, associations can use a cross-domain identity management system to add new employees, contractors, consultants, etc., and automate provisioning to access specific applications and resources they need.
2. Improves Corporate Security
In addition to sustaining a robust data security posture, automated provisioning sticks to policies set by the association, ideally those that follow the principle of least privilege.
As a result of giving specific system permissions and granular resource access based on each user’s role, security teams do not have to worry about negligent and underqualified employees compromising data integrity and confidentiality.
3. Cost-Efficient
Automate provisioning lowers expenses in two forms: productivity and efficiency. Reducing manual provisioning processes can save time and resources for other tasks. In addition to reducing downtime for users who do not have access, you also improve employee productivity, lower operating costs, and improve operational efficiency by preventing user downtime when they do not have access.
4. Reduce Errors
Automate user provisioning eliminates manual processes, which also reduces error margins. In addition, adding new users and provisioning applications are less likely to result in a slip-up.
Furthermore, automating user provisioning reduces the risk of data breaches and security threats because only the roles and permissions set by the organization can gain access to these applications.
Examples of Automated Provisioning
Here are two applications of automated provisioning that will help you understand this process further:
1. Get New Hires the Apps They Need Right Away
The foremost thing a new worker would like to do is make an immediate impact on the company. By leveraging workflow automation, you can ensure they have access to the apps they need from the moment they join your company.
SourceHere’s how it will work:
- When a new hire notice (an email that informs stakeholders of basic information about the new hire) is sent by an HRIS, the workflow is triggered.
- A supervisor receives an automated message in a company communications platform (for example, MS Teams) asking about the apps and access levels their incoming team member needs.
- An alert is sent to IT employees through their business communications platform.
- IT can then verify that it has enough licenses to accommodate the request, and if so, you can schedule the new hire’s first day of work for provisioning the apps.
2. Perform Ad-Hoc Provisions in a Matter of Clicks
In many cases, employees may need to access additional apps or alter how much access they have to a given app. Here are a few examples: New hires often require more apps than originally provisioned, employees get promoted and require higher access to certain apps, and employees change roles and require a whole new set of apps.
You can use the following automated provisioning workflow to accommodate these situations and many others:
- Managers (or beneficiaries) select “Provisioning” from their business communications platform’s chatbot.
- Information such as the employee’s name, the date the provisions are needed, and the precise app they need is requested.
- Upon submission, the chatbot informs the beneficiary of the manager’s request. A channel in the business comms platform (which includes IT employees) receives the request through a message simultaneously.
The request can be accepted or rejected with a single click of a button, or someone can ask for more information by clicking “Send Message.”
How to Automate User Provisioning Processes?
You don’t have to worry about HR paperwork because auto-provisioning streamlines tedious onboarding and automates active directory tasks, such as provisioning and handling users, making change requests, and migrating and removing users.
With the help of auto-provisioning, you can automate these tasks without writing any code, saving you hours every time a new employee joins. For example, here’s how you can automate user provisioning processes:
1. New Employee Onboarding
To automate the process, you need to create an employee onboarding checklist. Once you have gathered all the parts, you can create an automation workflow that bears the user creation, adding them to Active Directory, CRM, Salesforce, and other applications.
2. Employee Offboarding
Offboarding an employee has the same processes, and a checklist will help to start automating them. For instance, you may use bots to move user information to an archive area, disable a user’s access to applications, and move their information into an archive.
3. Change of Role/Permissions
You’ll have to negotiate with new user provisioning problems if a worker is upgraded or repositioned to a different functional area. You can automate removing or adding access to appropriate applications, receiving permissions for appropriate systems and applications, and being added to and removed from distribution lists. Automation will support making the transition more seamless because so many stages are involved.
4. User Auditing
You may neglect performing user audits on your to-do list. RPA bots can help here as well. For example, check for expired or disabled user accounts, and generate an automated report of invalid login attempts.
5. Manage Change Requests
After onboarding employees, they will still have needs that bots can help you with, such as password resets, updates, contact info updates, and payroll adjustments. It is attainable to eliminate mistakes and issues, operational costs, and time formerly spent bearing manual tasks by facilitating hundreds of adjustments needed weekly to handle your organization’s workforce.
Bottom Line
Onboarding and offboarding of users for applications are time-consuming when done manually and only become more difficult as the business grows. Auto-provisioning is the greatest solution to accelerate onboarding and offboarding.
In addition, automated provisioning helps organizations set permissions for technology resources based on employee roles, resulting in more reliable, hands-free provisioning that saves time.
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Automated provisioning FAQ's
Automated provisioning allows organizations to manage access and privileges to applications, websites, data, etc. It authorizes access to be granted automatically based on preset rules attributing rights to predefined roles and groups rather than manually assigning rights for each user.
DevOps' automated provisioning ability allows you to deliver computing power at your fingertips without manually interfering. In addition, enabling dynamic resource allocation across the enterprise enables app delivery at the speed of digital services through a flexible, extensible infrastructure.
Automated provisioning enables security and speeds up user access provisioning, which helps secure, scale, and optimizes the onboarding and lifecycle management processes.
By automating provisioning, you can reduce the burden and risk of manual provisioning and improve access management as users leave, change roles, or join an organization.
Updated : March 15, 2023
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