Overview of Identity Provisioning

What is identity provisioning?

Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a solution that authenticates and authorizes access to applications, data, and systems within your organization. An important component of IAM is identity provisioning, which creates, manages, and deletes user identities (accounts) based on stages of the identity lifecycle (i.e., starting a job, moving positions, leaving a job, etc.).

Identity provisioning manages user accounts and ensures they are getting access to the right resources and using them appropriately. Identity provisioning is a key component of the identity governance framework.

How does identity provisioning work?

As organizations shift from on-premises to a hybrid or multi-cloud environment, it becomes increasingly difficult to manually manage identities in various cloud environments. This can open enterprises up to data exposure, security and compliance violations. Identity provisioning tools help to securely provision identities to your cloud platforms, applications, and services.

Automated identity provisioning works by gathering user data, identifying what business roles the user should hold, and automating which accounts and groups they should have access to.

Let’s take an example of someone joining a company. At the onset of the onboarding process, their information will be added to an HR database. Then, depending on their role, identities (accounts) will be created for applications they’ll need access to (Salesforce, Workday, Box, etc.). When they change roles or leave the organization, their accounts are automatically adjusted or deprovisioned.  

Identity provisioning ensures you’re creating the right accounts and that you’re providing the right access.

Benefits of identity provisioning.

Managing identities can be a tedious process on the part of your IT and HR departments. With identity provisioning, you can improve efficiency, save time, and eliminate error that comes with manual lifecycle management. The process seeks to:

Improve efficiency.

Automated workflows in regard to identity provisioning free up time and improve efficiency on the part of departments such as IT and HR that are primarily responsible for managing the user lifecycle. They’ll be able to quickly enable their workforce with the tools and applications they need.

Save time.

Automating identity provisioning saves you from the time intensive manual process of gathering user data, creating users and establishing roles, and manually managing the identities throughout their entire lifecycle.

Eliminate error.

Automating identity provisioning reduces the margin of error that comes with manually adding a user to the system and provisioning access to resources and applications. You’ll also reduce the risk of security threat and potential data breach through the user roles and permission you setup in the onboarding process.

SailPoint’s provisioning solutions.

By automating identity provisioning, you can reduce IT complexity, along with the time, cost and effort that go into onboarding and offboarding. Identity provisioning ensures you’re creating the right accounts and that you’re continuously providing the right user access to systems and data. Identity provisioning is key to governance, and essential to managing access to your IT resources.

However, the process can become complex without a good IAM strategy. A robust IAM solution can help you solve challenges that come with a distributed and hybrid environment, including data security and regulatory compliance.

SailPoint’s identity governance solutions help you achieve productivity and efficiency, reduce human error, increase security, achieve greater audit capabilities, and much more.

Automate provisioning and increase security.