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The pros and cons of automated user provisioning software

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The list of cons is just as long as the list of advantages, however. There's no such thing as a best practice when it comes to implementing a provisioning system, but there are several essential steps necessary for making it work successfully:

• You must define, and modify, if necessary, every process for account creation/modification/deletion.
• You must meet with each business person who will be a source/recipient of account information and gain consensus on the business practices and data handling that will be used by the provisioning system.
• You must configure and map the data to every system connected to the provisioning system.
• You must define the workflow authorizations for each resource.
• Existing accounts will not be in the system and must be imported through an alternative process in order for the automated provisioning product to recognize them.
• You must define audit/reporting formats, as well as dates and times of audit execution.
• You must build the front-end request forms and reports that will be generated.
• You must change your business processes.
• Finally, you must protect the provisioning system from unauthorized access due to the sensitive nature of the operations.

But perhaps the biggest con is the cost: Provisioning systems aren't cheap. And on top of that, in order to execute each of the statements above, I generally take the price of the provisioning system and multiply it by six -- since vendors don't typically consider the true cost associated with an implementation -- to get a more accurate estimated cost of deployment.

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This was first published in June 2010

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