What is provisioning in IAM?

Provisioning is the creation, maintenance and deactivation of identities (user objects) and their attributes when they exist in several IAM systems or applications, usually triggered by automated or interactive business processes; copies or references of identities, and possibly entitlements, are transported from a data source such as HR, CRM or student administration into an IAM system.

* Provisioning: a business event in the source system pushes the identity into the targets before anyone logs in. *

Where federation moves identity information at login time, provisioning moves it beforehand:

• Trigger: a business event such as hiring, enrolment, a change of department, or leaving.
• Source: the system that knows about the event (HR for employees, CRM for customers, StudAdmin for students).
• Transport: a copy or a reference of the identity, with its attributes and often its entitlements, is written into the IAM system and from there into target applications.
• Life cycle: create on entry, update on change, deactivate or delete on exit.

The open standard for automating this is SCIM, the System for Cross-domain Identity Management.

Go deeper:

• Provisioning: user provisioning (Wikipedia) — creation, maintenance and deactivation of user objects as an automated process.