In an enterprise environment, provisioning mechanisms are used to ensure that users have access only to the entitlements that they need in order to perform the responsibilities assigned to them throughout their full life-cycle (i.e. employment to separation). Provisioning technologies should automate the previously manual responsibilities of the human resources and information technology departments. More formally, provisioning is the automation of all the life-cycle steps required to setup, maintain and terminate user access to directory and/or data target systems.
The life-cycles to be defined in order to assign users to the required level of access depend on the chosen provisioning model (i.e. rule-based provisioning, role-based provisioning).
