What is User Provisioning

User account provisioning is a process of identity and access management to manage a user’s rights and privileges for accessing the resources in an organization. User account provisioning is one of many identity management methods that describe managing a person’s digital identity, authentication, and authorization permissions.  

Why is User Provisioning Important?

A good user provisioning strategy can help your company in several ways. First, it’s a way to assure division of duties from internal control and audit. User provisioning makes life easier for managers in terms of productivity because they don’t have to manually set up access for each employee. Finally, by allowing access only when required, user provisioning decreases the danger of unwanted information access. 

Types of User Provisioning

There are four major types of user provisioning.  

Self-service account provisioning

Self-service user provisioning allows consumers to engage in a few elements of the account provisioning process, saving time for IT admins. For example, users are exclusively responsible for changing and managing their passwords. Self-service user provisioning enables users to reset their passwords themselves without the need to call the IT helpdesk team. It saves the time of the helpdesk team and the resources of the company.  

Discretionary account provisioning

Discretionary provisioning entails IT administrators deciding exclusively on a user’s access to a variety of applications and data. Although it is typical in small businesses, it can be inconvenient in huge corporations when done manually. Employees request and manage specific information using a password manager or a password-based system in this type of user provisioning, which relieves the administrator of some of the burden. This can help to speed up the user provisioning process, but it still relies on human processing capabilities.  

Workflow-based account provisioning

Granting access to information or applications requires leadership approval. Permissions are granted based on a user’s needs and criteria. The workflow-based provisioning requires approval from a manager or administrator before granting access rights to a user. For example, before a communications department could move on with developing consumer-facing advertising, a product manager or engineer would have to accept important claims made by the department.  

Alternatively, as is common in most firms, a manager’s signature may be required to sign off any financial transaction documentation. This makes the user accounts more secure and helps to keep a record of the access rights to accounts in an organization.  

Automated account provisioning

Entails using a centralized user provisioning solution to manage user accounts based on a preset set of rules. It allows the administrator to keep a close eye on user accounts and permissions without having to spend too much time on them. Although the program reduces the redundancy of the human process, there may be times when administrators must intervene. Automated user provisioning streamlines the entire process and offer businesses user tracking for recording user activity.  

Organizations use user provisioning according to their requirements of identity and access management. Tools4ever offers user provisioning services to organizations to help them manage user accounts and assign permission to authorized persons. Also, it helps create, disable and remove the user accounts as the employees join, or leave the company.