The first day at a new job is exciting for a new employee. They meet their new coworkers, learn the culture, and start a new chapter in their career. But sometimes, if HR and IT are overwhelmed or if the company's hiring level is elevated, it takes a few days to get a new employee access to the software they need, leaving them with an employee who doesn't know what to do.
And now some of you may be wondering, what is provisioning?
User provisioning is creating and maintaining a user's digital identity, authentication, and authorization rights. User provisioning and deprovisioning are also granting and restricting access to applications and systems. User provisioning saves HR and IT departments time by automating cumbersome processes and can increase efficiency by getting new employees to access immediately. On the other hand, deprovisioning users increase cybersecurity by restricting access to employees just as they leave the company, a procedure that, if done manually, can be forgotten, putting the company's security and sensitive data at risk.
If you are a software development company and your company falls into or reflects one of these three models, you need user provisioning.
MODEL I
Industry/vertical: Fintechs, Retail, Software
Employee headcount: 50-250 employees
Annual revenue: 20M-300M$
Budget for expenses: 8% of annual revenue
Budget for apps: 100 USD/ employee
Technologies they use: Atlassian suite, G-Suite, Notion, Discord, and Figma.
Size of their customer base: <10 (Enterprise) 10-50 (B2B), >1000 (B2C)
Level of organizational or tech maturity: medium/advanced
MODEL II
Industry/vertical: App and web development
Employee headcount: 30-50
Annual revenue: 1 -10M
Budget for expenses: 10% annual revenue
Budget for apps: 100 USD/ employee
Technologies they use: Slack, Jira, Github, Pipedrive, google workspace
Figma, Invision, Miro, Asana, and Notion.
Size of their customer base: 3-7 projects running
Level of organizational or tech maturity: Low- Mid
MODEL III
Industry/vertical: Back and front-end development
Employee headcount: 200-500
Annual revenue: 50-100M
Budget for expenses: 5% annual revenue
Budget for apps: 150 USD/employee
Technologies they use: Slack, Jira, Trello, Github, Gitlab, and Bamboo HR
Size of their customer base: 13 projects running for 6 clients
Level of organizational or tech maturity: Mid- High
These models have been created from accurate data and under real needs that these kinds of companies present. So if you are here, you should read on. This post is going to interest you!
One problem that these companies report is that their hiring volume is medium/high, and carrying out all the onboarding processes and when in the opposite case the employees leave their position, manually is tedious and unsafe.
User provisioning is usually linked to HR actions; this department has a fundamental role in any company.
For example, user provisioning ensures that updating an employee's record to indicate that they have left their job would automatically remove their access to databases, applications, etc. In reality, these processes tend to be time-consuming, error-prone, manual work that has to be performed by HR, IT, or a combination of both. Automating this work is key to the efficiency of the workers and the safety of the company.
In addition, these companies often have a relationship with technologies and deal almost daily with an infinite amount of sensitive data and should not be at risk of security breaches.
Increase efficiency with user provisioning.
In all companies, efficiency is key to growth and good results. That's why we must stress that user provisioning, especially when automated, is essential in helping all employees focus on the work that matters.
Accelerate employee onboarding.
As we have already introduced, one of the most significant use cases for automated user provisioning is to ease and reduce the problems concerning onboarding new employees. Without user provisioning, a new employee might have to wait days to access all the data and applications or software they need.
Setting up accounts for new employees may seem like low-value work for the HR or IT team, who will be busy multitasking. So automating this process dramatically reduces the burden on those departments to focus on more complex tasks to automate and help move the company forward.
In addition, these business models have teams of programmers or specialists who only work in-house for a temporary project; procurement gets temporary workers on the job quickly.
If your company regularly uses these types of temporary contracts, provisioning new users is even more critical because it is an ongoing task. The process of repeatedly creating new accounts, distributing them to temporary employees, and then deactivating them is not only time-consuming. Still, it carries a lot of risk to your company's security. If the temp uses many different applications, it's easy to forget to add one that they might need, and by the time the temp realizes they need it and calls HR or IT, days have passed, and a lot of time has been wasted.
On the other hand, if an employee gets a promotion or moves to another department, their duties and leave will most likely change. And the last evasion, when the job is over, deactivate all accounts to avoid exposing sensitive information to cybercriminals.
Facilitates organizational updates
It is widespread to change work tools and software in the business models described above. The provisioning of users by configuring roles and groups makes it easier for the IT department to perform updates between organizations. Therefore, the process will be less costly if your company decides to change the work management tools it uses for others that are more efficient or better adapted to its work rhythm.
There will be no need to announce to employees and ask them to sign up for the new tool and delete their old accounts for security. At the same time, you will not have to track who does not have a new version yet and who left an old account unclosed in the old tool, which will be an unnecessary expense of budgets. The IT department can do it all at once with a single click. All users will have the new tool added to their role and the old one deleted.
With this, we have shown you that user provisioning is the ultimate solution for your company and that, little by little, it will be introduced in all industry sectors and adapted to each of the business models.
So if you think that your company does not fit into any of the three models mentioned above, you consider that user provisioning can fit and help your company scale.
We show you the gradual process to implement user provisioning in your company.
Step 1: Analyze the access management program and evaluate it.
To start implementing any new process in a company, the first step is to observe. In the case of implementing user provisioning, you should start by analyzing your current IAM process and assessing where you are at and your level of maturity. It is essential to train and explain to employees, especially the IT team, precisely what user provisioning consists of. Their role will be necessary because they will be the ones implementing it. Review the effectiveness of the current process in terms of account creation, permissions granting, management and deletion. It is also essential to evaluate it in terms of its security, responsiveness, and usability. Once we have done this exercise thoroughly, we will have a clear report on whether or not user provisioning needs to be implemented.
Step 2: Do a mock user provisioning business simulation
Every process takes time and good practice to see results. User provisioning is not a magical solution that will bring profits in one day. It is an investment in terms of time and money. That's why as a company, you should consider and assess its benefits and drawbacks before going straight to implementing it. That's why recreating a business case that evaluates the current IAM process makes a lot of sense and can give you even more context. You will assess whether the tool covers the fields and factors such as its overall competency to cover all systems. How simple or complex it will be for employees, its efficiency and speed in deprovisioning former employees, and its productivity. In addition to testing in detail how user provisioning will support your company in terms of strengthening your cybersecurity, minimizing risks, and increasing productivity, the purpose of recreating this business case is to test and see how the tool would fit in to save costs and time.
Step 3: Centralize systems and control critical applications.
It is a challenge for any company in this era of digitization to manage access in a large organization. This process can be complex, with hundreds of employees needing access to thousands of different software applications. Therefore, we recommend that you start by identifying and listing the most critical applications and critical systems in the organization before moving forward with the process.
Step 4: Start a free trial.
Nowadays, all software presents a free trial option for a minimum of 1 month. Testing is an essential aspect of any implementation process and should always be performed as a general rule. Therefore the next step in the user provisioning implementation process is to test a free trial and involve some members of the organization such as the CTO, Head of IT/Systems/Ops or Team lead to encourage employee participation and testing from within implementing company-wide. The free trial is the time to evaluate the tool based on user experience, time saved, productivity achieved, etc. Run the free trial during the month-long trial, and during this time, you can monitor its performance and make any necessary changes.
Step 5: Full implementation of user provisioning across the enterprise
We are in the penultimate step. After following the previous steps, the user provisioning process is ready to be launched throughout the organization. The free trial has made it clear that you need the tool. The knowledge, understanding, and feedback generated by the pilot program will guide you through the implementation and ensure that everything goes as smoothly as possible.
Step 6: Follow the process and regularly monitor the new tool.
At this point, you have made a decision that is likely to change the direction and productivity of your business. But simply implementing the user provisioning solution and forgetting about it is not ideal for long-term success. Remember to develop a regular monitoring process that keeps track of the number of user provisioning requests on a monthly, quarterly or annual basis, and last but not least, have fluid communication with your team and let them be the ones who will be using the tool on a day-to-day basis to give you feedback, which should report to the user provisioning tool's technical team to make the necessary updates.
After analyzing the step-by-step process for implementing user provisioning in your company, you can see how following these steps will enable your company to use this type of software to facilitate and increase your productivity
If you are ready to join the change,
remember that User Provisioning is:
