As the IT landscape becomes more complex and system administrators must provide users with an ever-increasing number and variety of resources, many administrators are looking for the best user provisioning software to fit their needs. Each user provisioning software works differently and offers different capabilities. Today we will show you why and how to choose the best user provisioning software to find the right tool for your company.

An increasingly recurrent problem that worries companies and SaaS is the misuse of digital resources, which are a critical factor for a company's success.

But despite their importance today, there is little control over who has access to these vital resources, including computers, PDAs, and access to a plethora of business, security, and IT applications and services.

An anecdotal but daily occurrence in companies is when an employee leaves their job to go to a competitor's company. Usually, nobody asks for or stops the accesses and permissions of this person to the databases that they had in the company. Therefore, accessing confidential information for this former employee is very easy, and exposing the company's security is even easier.

For this reason, procurement software and solutions have been gaining an important place in the market for some time now. They are tools designed to help a company protect against identity abuse by securely automating IT and HR tasks.

It facilitates secure self-service, compliance with security standards necessary for audits, and obtaining certifications such as SOC2, HIPAA, etc., that are increasingly required by industry regulations.

Before offering the tips to choose the best user provisioning tool, we will answer your question of

What is user provisioning?

User provisioning is an identity access management process that ensures that user accounts are created, updated, deleted, and given appropriate access across many applications and SAAS systems simultaneously. User/employee information such as name, attributes, group name, and other associated data are available through account and access management, allowing you to grant or prohibit access based on your needs. Provisioning ensures that user access rights and privileges are up to date without the need for manual intervention. Provisioning provides that access is granted only when necessary, preventing hackers from exploiting security flaws to gain unauthorized access to important company data.

With that in mind, we can move on and show you some guidelines to consider as your company prepares to select a provisioning product.

1.Provisioning is not only an IT issue. It is also a business issue.

Controlling access to IT resources is not just an IT issue. Good use of IT resources often means the difference between business success and failure. Knowing and granting employees access to the resources they need to do their jobs (and that they stop having that access when they don't need it) is a business issue.

This is why you need to look for a provisioning tool that allows company managers to define changes that affect an employee's access rights, such as a new colleague joining, a change of department, the start of a new project with different roles, etc.

 2. Introduce standards and directory-based       infrastructures

Since provisioning products touch many parts of an organization's infrastructure, it is essential to know that the provisioning tool of choice is committed to standards that allow disparate systems to communicate through a standardized interface.

3.Integration of all processes

When employees join a company, they typically enter a project and workgroups. Companies that hire employees can subsequently fire them. Each time a person moves, their IT resource needs also change. Mapping business changes to IT resource changes can be pretty complicated.

It is essential to keep in mind that the business staff is the only one who can accurately define a business role change, such as a move or the creation of a workgroup. In addition, the tool must be able to directly determine changes in the provisioning system. The system must interpret the change and automatically understand how each business change affects a person's IT resource entitlements.

must execute automated tasks

And not only this, but approvals must also obtain licenses for all tasks. Different groups of people must be informed of the functions to perform and execute automated tasks. Not to forget, all these tasks must be assigned to the right people in the correct order, and there must be an escalation mechanism in case a task fails.

But these terms may sound more to a large enterprise, so for small companies, simple provisioning tools provide an approval workflow, whereby they will obtain approval before activating the provisioning tasks.

But in general, for most procurement projects, you should look for a product that provides a dynamic workflow that performs the following functions:

-Automate workflow construction based on the context of business change.

-Ability to manage task delegation.

-Offer an integrated escalation mechanism to manage approval request failures.

-IT automation

Even the most experienced IT team finds it difficult and time-consuming to manually manage all aspects of user onboarding and provisioning.

To ensure and guarantee that your resources are being used correctly for the entire organization, you need to come up with a tool that automates tasks such as:

-Creating new operating system accounts.

-Deactivating e-mail accounts.

-Changing role access rights.

-The provisioning product communicates with IT and security systems through connector software. Usually, a different connector is created for each system that must control.

4.Password management

An employee in our company has access to many systems, each of which has a different password that must update periodically. To remember passwords, people use easy passwords or write them down and leave them in easy-to-find places. Either approach creates large security holes, and unauthorized people can easily access restricted resources.

A good provisioning tool usually offers a password management tool. It is essential to maintain security within your enterprise.

So these tools feature everything from primary password reset functions, which allows users to reset their passwords on different systems from a web interface to password reset such as password synchronization, which automatically changes many system passwords when the password of a designated system is changed.

5. Reporting and auditing in a compliance world

The international landscape has led to an increased focus on information security and identity management in all companies. There has been a corresponding increase in the need to accurately track and report on who has access to IT resources for some time now. New regulations associated with information security are driving many provisioning projects today. So if you have a technology company, and you want to work with others or often close a contract with a client, your company will be required to have certifications such as SOC2 or HIPAA. To comply with these regulations, you need to provide accurate IT reports on who has access to what and when they have had that access.

When looking for the best user provisioning tool, keep in mind that software provides a certain level of information about the allocation of resources.

But before you start looking for a digital solution, we recommend that you make an assessment of your company and ask yourself where you are, what you need, what budget you have, and how much time you have for it:

Listen to the team to see what their needs are, what they miss in the current tools, and what they would like. They are a fundamental part of the success of the implementation; training is essential to take full advantage of the potential benefits of the chosen technology.

Keep in mind that Integrations and the roadmap you will follow to see if future integrations will be helpful to your company. Consider the integrations with the rest of the tools, ask yourself what other tools you need to interact with.

The pricing system and implementation time are always essential to know what budget you have, and the time you have available for the tool to be implemented.

By following these steps, and applying them to your own company and its needs, you will find the best user provisioning software that will facilitate many processes for your company.