A Guide to Automating IT Onboarding and Provisioning

It’s the very first day for your new employee. They’ve completed their initial paperwork, and they’re ready to hit the ground running … but your IT team has been swamped and there’s no sign of their laptop being ready until next week.

Now what?

In today’s job market, it’s more important than ever for organizations to attract and retain top talent — a process that’s highly contingent on a successful onboarding experience. If end users are stuck waiting around for access in their first days at your company, it can leave a bad impression and give them one more reason to explore the competition — or take the other offer they received at the time you hired them.

Learn how your IT team can create an automated user provisioning process that helps you to retain talent and better allocate your resources.

What is user provisioning?

Before we get into how to automate IT onboarding, it’s important to establish a clear understanding of what standard user provisioning looks like.

As Gartner has defined it, user or account provisioning is the process of creating, modifying and, when necessary, deleting profiles and accounts across all enterprise network system applications. The software used to implement these changes helps teams to better manage settings across onboarding, offboarding and other necessary but time-consuming administrative tasks —  think internal promotions or cross-department transfers. 

By successfully aggregating and managing data across different networks such as your organization’s customer relationship management (CRM) software, human resources database and email system, it becomes easier to maintain compliance and security.

When user provisioning is left as a manual process, it’s possible for employees to slip through the cracks. For new hires, this likely contributes to the 47% of onboarding programs that fail to successfully retain recent hires, says the Society for Human Resource Management. 

For employees who have been terminated or voluntarily quit? A failure to successfully complete provisioning could create a major security gap, exposing sensitive data and proprietary information. 

How to automate onboarding and provisioning 

Even the most experienced IT team can become overwhelmed when it comes to manually managing every aspect of onboarding and user provisioning. 

To ensure your resources are being deployed in a way that’s valuable to your entire organization, look for a solution that provides the following features:

Single-platform application deployment: 

As your organization grows, so does the challenge of onboarding and maintaining new user settings. Your team needs software that will help them to set up, deploy and upgrade every device from one secure platform. 

The best solution will be one that leverages an intuitive user interface and provides real-time insights to make the process as streamlined as possible. Not only will this help to simplify initial onboarding by configuring users’ systems to a default setting created by IT, but having a holistic view of all network devices will make it easy to push updates as needed. 

Integration with single-sign on (SSO) processes:

Single sign-on procedures help maximize your end users’ time by allowing them to use just one login rather than having to go through different authentication processes for every system they have access to.

Some user provisioning software can be integrated with SSO, saving a significant amount of security administration time and reducing manual errors. After a user has automatically been onboarded and their network systems are configured, their SSO settings will work across every database they need for their day-to-day responsibilities. 

Role-based security access:

Role-based access control (RBAC) allows your team to better scale their provisioning processes. Rather than approaching security clearance by individual, IT can create default settings by role based on the responsibilities and needs of each team.

As Data Insider explains, through RBAC, your team is able to better manage what end users can access at both a broad and granular level. IT can designate whether the user is an administrator, a specialist user or an end user, thereby aligning roles and access permissions with your employees’ positions in the organization. Permissions are allocated only with enough access as needed for employees to do their jobs — keeping sensitive data safe from unauthorized eyes.

The benefits of automated onboarding and provisioning

Although onboarding and provisioning will look a little different depending on the systems your organization leverages on a day-to-day basis, every company can unlock seriously pretty powerful benefits when the process becomes automated:

• Easier to scale: As your organization grows, IT can easily execute a unified approach to onboarding and provisioning with the click of a button. Without an automated procedure in place, there’s the potential for human error to lead to a major security breach.
• Minimized resource waste: Without having to manage this highly time-consuming process, IT can focus more of its resources on valuable tasks and finding new efficiencies for your organization.
  
• Improved productivity: Onboarding can be a vastly different experience from company to company, but for many employees, it involves a lot of sitting around and waiting for access. By eliminating the need for manual access clearance, your new hires can begin working as soon as they’re ready. 

Done right, automation can relieve the strain on your IT systems and create new efficiencies for both administrators and end users.

How Faronics can help

With so many solutions and different types of software on the market, it can be hard to figure out which make the most sense for your organization and its unique needs. 

At Faronics, we understand that. That’s why we offer a suite of one-of-kind, next-generation computer management tools, making it easier than ever for IT teams to create and implement a unified approach to user onboarding and provisioning.

With Faronics Deploy, administrators can view every device on your network from one place with the ability to find, fix and automate updates from anywhere through a cloud-based architecture. Armed with real-time reporting capabilities and user-friendly dashboards, your IT team will be able to spot a potential vulnerability before it ever has the chance to become an actual security breach.

Our easy-to-use device management tools provide maximum control over your enterprise systems, helping your organization stay secure no matter how much your team grows.

If you’re interested in getting started with an automated onboarding and provisioning tool, contact us today.