User lifecycle management automation: where access governance breaks down

TL;DR: Manual onboarding, role changes, and offboarding leave SaaS access spread across ticket queues and spreadsheets, which slows productivity and increases the chance that stale privileges survive after employees leave, according to Zluri. Automating user lifecycle management shifts access governance from ad hoc handling to repeatable provisioning and deprovisioning discipline.

NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Zluri: Why Automating User Lifecycle Management is Crucial

By the numbers:

• 91% of former employee tokens remain active after offboarding, leaving organisations vulnerable to potential security breaches.
• 70% of organisations grant AI systems more access than they would give a human employee performing the exact same job.

Questions worth separating out

Q: How should organisations automate employee onboarding without creating excess access?

A: Start by defining role-based entitlement sets for common positions, then trigger those sets through a standard onboarding workflow.

Q: Why do manual mover processes create identity governance risk?

A: Manual mover handling often adds new access without reliably removing the old access.

Q: What breaks when offboarding is handled as a manual checklist?

A: Manual offboarding fails when one or more applications are missed, accounts stay active, or revocation is not verified.

Practitioner guidance

• Map joiner-mover-leaver workflows to role-based access rules Define the approved apps and entitlements for each role, then use those mappings to drive onboarding and mover events so access is consistent rather than manually assembled.
• Build offboarding as a verified revocation workflow Require every departure path to confirm account deactivation and application-level access removal, then review failed or pending runs before closing the case.
• Include app discovery in mover governance Track which SaaS tools employees actually use so role changes can remove obsolete access and not just add the new access that was requested.

What's in the full article

Zluri's full blog post covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:

• Step-by-step onboarding workflow configuration for assigning SaaS access by department or role
• How the Employee App Store changes self-service app selection and request handling
• Offboarding run status tracking for completed, failed, and pending deprovisioning actions
• Practical examples of saving workflows into reusable playbooks for repeat lifecycle events

👉 Read Zluri's article on automating user lifecycle management →

User lifecycle management automation: where access governance breaks down?

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