Many organizations have a large number of users, including employees, clients, and managers. These individuals use the organization’s data for different purposes. For example, some use it to carry out their day-to-day tasks on software applications, while others use the company’s data for other peculiar purposes.
However, whatever they use the information for, it's vital to regulate these users' access permissions to maintain security and adhere to compliance requirements.
One of the biggest challenges for the IT section of an enterprise is manually managing all user accounts, group memberships, onboarding processes, creating new accounts, granting and revoking permissions, and tracking resource usage. These tasks can be time-consuming if you do them manually. Furthermore, there is the risk of individual errors, which could lead to the leak or exposure of clients' sensitive personal information.
Luckily, you can avoid these issues through appropriate user provisioning, which requires automated provisioning tools and guarantees efficiency and accuracy. User provisioning tools help to streamline and automate the user provisioning process. They reduce the difficulties and delays associated with manually managing user accounts while also increasing work efficiency.
In this article, we’ll discuss why organizations need to implement well-planned user provisioning.
What is user provisioning?
User provisioning/user account provisioning is a digital identity and access management process that involves creating user accounts and assigning them relevant rights and permissions to access an organization's resources. But it goes beyond creating accounts. It also includes maintaining, updating, and deleting a user’s account and access from multiple applications and systems all at once.
User information such as name, job title, group name, department, and other associated data are available through account and access management. This allows organizations to grant or revoke access to users.
Notably, user provisioning is triggered when a new user is hired and onboarded. The organization creates an account for them with the appropriate rights and permissions. Then, it monitors, manages and modifies the account as the user gets promoted or transferred. Also, when it’s time for the user to depart the organization, the organization deactivates and deletes the account in a process called User Deprovisioning.
There are four types of user provisioning.
Discretionary account provisioning
Discretionary account provisioning is when ONLY the network administrator decides which user should have access to certain organizational resources. This type of user provisioning is popular among small and mid-sized companies.
Self-service account provisioning
This form of user provisioning gives freedom to end users to participate in certain aspects of the provisioning process ro reduce the administrator's workload. For example, users can manage and change their own passwords.
Workflow-based account provisioning
Under workflow-based account provisioning, approvals must be obtained from the appropriate quarters before users can get access.
Automated account provisioning
A centralized application or software manages all user accounts, and guidelines can be created to set up each account in a specific way. This streamlines the process of adding and managing user accounts and offers administrators the most efficient way to monitor who has access to specific applications and data sources.
User account lifecycle
The following are the major processes involved in a user provisioning lifecycle;
Hiring and onboarding
When an organization hires a new employee, they create a new user profile for them with the relevant access and permissions for their position. Depending on the organization, the Human Resources (HR), Information Technology (IT) departments, and direct supervisors work together to grant these permissions.
Reviews and updates
Companies must regularly review access and permissions to maintain a streamlined and compliant operation. A user’s needs and permissions will change over time due to transfers, promotions, role changes, reorgs, or newly-implemented IT systems. So, user provisioning allows the employer to make a seamless transition by giving them relevant access rights.
One-off access
Situations may arise where teams onboard users on contractual terms who might need temporary access to certain information assets. Yet, the team must efficiently manage a one-off user’s provisioning. Furthermore, once the contract is over, they should immediately implement deprovisioning.
Deprovisioning
This is the process of deleting and deactivating a user’s account when they leave the organization. This helps to efficiently manage resources and also reduce the risk of data leaks by a disgruntled employee.
Automated user provisioning tools
User provisioning tools are software that helps organizations quickly, affordably, effectively, and securely manage information about users on multiple systems and applications. They automate the process of adding, updating, and deleting users, as well as managing their access.
Automated provisioning tools help minimize the impact of human error and manual provisioning, giving the IT department time to focus on more important tasks and improve productivity.
The best user provisioning software reduces the repetitive process of user provisioning. They can also identify and suggest with 100% accuracy what applications the new users will need access to considering their role and department. Therefore, this reduces the burdens IT asset managers face when it comes to identifying and providing the tools that new hires need.
In addition, automated provisioning improves the onboarding experience for users. Seamless onboarding, which includes appropriate access to resources, helps organizations retain more new hires.
Benefits of implementing a well-planned user provisioning in your organization
The innovation of several applications and software has simplified the processes of organizations across different industries. However, many business practices are still complicated by these innovations. Employees require more tools on more devices to effectively do their jobs.
Also, organizations are confronted with issues like time-wasting and data breaches. A well-planned user account provisioning can help mitigate these issues and streamline workflows across entire organizations. Below are the benefits of user provisioning:
Improves productivity
In the process of onboarding new employees, contractors, clients, partners, and everyone else who requires access to the organization’s software, resources, and data, need to be granted credentials based on permission levels.
Manual onboarding and provisioning practices involve extended periods spent creating accounts, approving and forwarding access requests to relevant quarters to be analyzed, processed, and activated. Sadly, this burdens your HR and IT resources, especially when provisioning a high number of users as your organization continues to expand.
You can invest the time spent on the manual provisioning process in other tasks. Hence, it affects your overall productivity. However, a well-planned user provisioning utilizing automated provisioning tools will reduce the labor that traditional provisioning requires.
Helps mitigate security risks
Security is one of the most important issues for organizations that collect sensitive data and personal information from their clients. Bad actors, hackers, and other cyber criminals are constantly looking for ways to intrude into your company’s servers. Therefore, it’s important for an organization to control its employees’ privileges.
If you do not efficiently monitor user provisioning, you may provide employees with the wrong access levels. This can leave the entire system vulnerable. So, if a cybercriminal accessed your system, they may only need to go through one compromised account with several permissions and access, such as an administrator account. There’s no telling the damage they can cause if such an event happens.
But with an effective user provisioning system in place, IT teams can track and monitor what devices and information assets are being accessed, who is accessing them, and the points of access. Consequently, this eliminates security risks and protects and maintains the security of sensitive data.
Role-based system access
Users need access to several software and resources based on their role or department in the company to function effectively. User provisioning makes it possible to designate role-based access controls while allowing an organization to tailor access based on internal policies and regulations.
Assured compliance
User provisioning is a component of compliance strategy, too. Compliance also ties into the problem of security when provisioning new user accounts. You must follow compliance standards if your organization handles sensitive information, such as financial or health data, and one of them is appropriate access to the data.
An example is the HIPAA law that mandates the protection of individually identifiable health information. Granting access to users who do not absolutely require such information would be in breach of HIPAA privacy law. Notably, this breach can attract legal sanctions for your organization.
So, if your company handles these kinds of sensitive data, your user provisioning processes and access management policies are critical. You can control who has access to which tools and applications and trace the account activity through automated provisioning and various other access policies. Additionally, you will always be able to verify and validate access, which will help to keep your organization in compliance with privacy laws.
Makes password management easier
One of the easiest tactics for cybercriminals to breach a company's security is through weak passwords. But user provisioning ensures that the right password policies, access privileges, and guidelines about the strength, aging, and reuse of a password are in place. Where a user account faces external threats due to password issues, the IT department can easily de-provision the account from the backend. Thus, ensuring the safety of the organization.
Final thoughts
Employing user provisioning to effectively onboard or offboard users is vital for all organizations. It saves time and adds a massive security layer on your information assets, thus keeping you in compliance with privacy laws. As we have shown above, well-planned user provisioning offers your organization several advantages. So, you can start leveraging them today.
WRITTEN BY
Lydia Iseh