Future Trends in User Provisioning

What is user provisioning? Put simply, It’s the process of creating, managing, and monitoring user accounts in a system. For example, once you sign up on a platform, a user account is automatically created for you. This usually comes with certain limited privileges based on the platform.

Many tools offer free and paid subscription plans. When you register on such platforms, an account is created for you. However, since it’s a free plan, it’s likely to have limited rights or access. 

When you upgrade to a paid plan, however, your user account gets access to more privileges. The moment your paid subscription expires, your account will be relegated to a free plan and the premium rights are revoked.

Organizations also enjoy user provisioning as well. This happens when new employees are hired, and their accounts are created with only the access required to complete their tasks.

When promoted along the same vertical, additional rights and privileges are provided to their account. When the employees get transferred to another department, the access, rights, and privileges of their accounts are replaced with the ones required by their new roles.

Also, when employees are on leave, their accounts are temporarily disabled and reactivated when they resume. Finally, when they eventually leave the organization the user accounts are deactivated.

The user provision concept took the world by storm and its market is growing rapidly. Here’s statistical evidence. The user provisioning market grew from $3.81 Billion in 2016 to $7.56 Billion in 2022. 

This amounts to a compound annual growth rate of 12.2%. Therefore, It’s needless to state that the demand for user provision tools and services keeps increasing geometrically. However, if you’re wondering why the market is growing at such an astonishing pace, you’ll need to check out the benefits of user provisioning tools we’ve listed below.

Automated Provisioning Benefits

Security Enhancement

To enhance security in an organization, access to certain information or resources is restricted to only employees that are on the management level. On that note, the privileges attached to the user accounts of lower-cadre employees are determined on a need-to-know basis. They are given only the accesses they need to do their jobs. This is done with user provisioning tools.   

With any automated provisioning tool, you’ll easily assign and revoke access to different resources in your organization. Of course, if an employee goes on leave, the rights and privileges on his account may be temporarily revoked. And if an employee resigns, his account may be deactivated immediately. By taking these security measures, the cases of breach of security are reduced drastically.

Ease of Monitoring

You may want to have access to what your employees do on the system to be sure the policies and procedures are not violated in any way. Provisioning software can easily achieve that. As the CEO or managing director of your company, you might want to have an overview of what every member of your team is doing at any point in time. User provisioning tools will make this possible.

Saving of Time

In every organization, there are sets of privileges attached to the accounts of employees on that level. This means when an account is placed on that level the privileges are automatically attached to that account. This is applicable to subscription-based online tools too. Once the account of a user is upgraded from a free to a paid plan, certain privileges are automatically linked to it.

Such provision automation helps to save a lot of manhours. Without a provisioning tool, it will take several minutes or hours to assign privileges to every account after creation. Imagine if you had to attach privileges to the user accounts of over 500 employees one after the other. Provisioning software saves you the time and effort that would have been used for the task.

Ease of System Auditing

These days, most organizations have a central database and employees access it from different locations with their different user accounts. At some point, some regulatory or legal authorities may want to assess the system to verify the integrity and operational standards of your company. User provisioning makes this very easy.

You could create temporary guest accounts for them. The accounts may be available for about some hours, days, weeks, or months, depending on how long it takes them to carry out their duties. After that, you can easily de-provision or deactivate the accounts.

Login Harmonization

Many organizations make use of various tools and applications in their daily operation. Imagine you make use of more than 7 tools to work. In that situation, it will be stressful and cumbersome for your team member to manually log into each of the tools one after the other. Provisioning users to make use of a single login interface is the best idea. That means, once a user logs into his account, he’ll have automatic access to all the applications he needs to work. He won’t need to log into all of them one by one.

Choosing a User Provisioning Tool

Many organizations are already finding automated provisioning tools almost indispensable because of the unified communications benefits. And you’re probably about to get one too. When selecting user-provisioning software, consider the following factors.

1.  Scalability – You may want to expand or streamline your business at any time, and you may want to divest into other types of business. You need to get a tool that offers such scalability and flexibility.

2.  Compatibility – Choose a tool that integrates easily with your existing IT infrastructure and architecture. You don’t need a tool that will make you change the software and applications that your employees have already mastered.

3.  Automation Capability – Go for a tool that makes it easy for you to automate certain processes like granting access permissions, assigning roles, and creating user accounts. This is the real beauty of provisioning automation.

4.  Auditing and Report Features – You may also add ease of reporting to the equation. Every organization needs a tool that can easily pull out reports as quickly as needed.

Now that we have gotten all the necessary information about automated provisioning tools out of the way, let’s dive straight into the forecast and future trend of the tool, its demand, and its market.

      Source: Pexels 

Future Trends in User Provisioning Market

Based on the current rate of growth of the market, it’s believed that the user provisioning market will hit about $15 billion by 2031. That figure will amount to a compound annual growth rate of 13.6%. Currently, North America has the lion’s share in the market. The region holds on to 35% of the market and it is expected that this region will account for even a higher percentage by 2031.

The region is followed by Asia Pacific with a share of 25%. And it’s likely that this percentage will keep increasing and by 2031, its share will be quite close to what North America has clinched. That means the other three – Europe, South America, and Africa – with respective percentages of 20%, 10%, and 3%, will have smaller percentages but their individual markets will also witness tangible growth.

Although there are several players in this industry, many more will spring up in new areas. Finally, if you’re yet to sign up for a user provisioning tool or service, you’re probably leaving time and money on the table. Joining in on making use of user provisioning can be invaluable and free up some manhours now.