How Automated User Provisioning can Improve your Business’s Efficiency and Security

For multi-seat contact centers, perhaps with hundreds if not thousands of seats, provisioning multiple services and applications to the workforce is a mammoth task. Adding and removing users from each service and application that the organization uses, adjusting user rights, and dealing with requests to reset passwords are all time-sensitive, security-critical tasks that come in on a daily basis. Completing these tasks manually is a huge drain on time, and greatly reduces the efficiency of administrators and wider IT teams. This is where automated user provisioning comes in.

Automated user provisioning is the process of granting and managing the access rights and authorization privileges of users across the applications, systems, and services that an organization uses, all through automation. Automated user provisioning enables rapid and easy on-boarding and off-boarding of users, as well as any changes to a user’s provisioning status.

This frees administrators and IT teams from repetitive user requests, which drives efficiency and streamlines team workflows. As a result, administrators are free to focus on enhancing the IT infrastructure rather than simply maintaining it.

Your workforce is always changing. Employee turnover is a natural part of business – and of course, employees change roles regularly. For example, advancing to a more senior position within the contact center. Therefore new starters, and employees with changing roles, must be able to access to the right systems and applications. However, more importantly, leavers must be able to be removed from all systems and applications quickly and easily. Otherwise this can pose a significant security risk.

With automated user provisioning, administrators and IT teams only need to make changes once, in a central identity management system. These changes are then executed across every connected system and application within the contact center automatically. This removes any human error, and reduces the risk of a security breach.

In a nutshell, with automated user provisioning, administrators and IT teams only need to manage a single set of user identity information.

System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM) is the standard method of automating the exchange of user identity information between identity management domains, IT systems, applications, and services. SCIM removes the need for manual configuration by improving the connectivity between systems and applications. As such, SCIM allows IT teams to manage user identities in cloud-based applications and services more easily, which simplifies large-scale provisioning. SCIM is growing in importance as organizations move increasingly to cloud services. It ensures that provisioning is based on one set of identities and one standardized API, which is vital to providing secure authentication and enhancing IT team efficiency.