SailPoint’s Adam Bacia lets us in on a little secret — provisioning means access.
Learn more about the art of provisioning.
Video Transcript
Adam Bacia: So provisioning is one of those words that we use all the time in the identity industry. Problem is, it doesn’t really mean anything to people outside of our industry.
I mean, after all, we’re not exactly giving ammunitions or rations to the military. So what is provisioning when we say that? Well the nice thing is it’s actually pretty easy to explain because we are giving something to somebody. It’s just instead of rations or ammunitions, what we are actually giving is access.
So the example I give people is, think of your favorite hotel. When you go to check in they actually give you a little plastic card key. That card key will give you access to all of the places that you need to get into, from your hotel room, to the gym, to the pool. If you were VIP maybe gives you access to the executive business center.
The maids on the other hand, they have access card keys that get them into every room on a floor for their next shift or when they check in the next day. Maybe they get a different card key that gives them access to every room on a different floor. The security guy, one of the maintenance guys, their card keys may give them access to every room in the entire hotel. But the system that’s behind that and makes sure those card keys only let you into the places that you’re supposed to get into and not into the places that you’re not supposed to get into.
Well, that’s what’s really doing the governance of access and that’s what we do. Only we do it for applications, in fact thousands of applications. Instead of hotel rooms we do it for hundreds of thousands of users across companies all over the globe.
So that’s really all that provisioning is, it’s the granting of access. By that same token, then deprovisioning obviously is the taking away of access.
Hopefully that clears up any mystery around provisioning.
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