The reduction in administrative costs for setting up and tearing down accounts across a large number of enterprise applications is usually more than sufficient to justify a provisioning project. But provisioning solutions are also becoming a critical component of regulatory compliance because they help management systematically review employee permissions and handle orphaned accounts.

Enterprises can use federation technologies to reduce the administrative costs associated with securing access to browser-based applications across autonomous domains. Today’s implementations occur primarily across business units and in industry consortia and existing partner collaborations. Typically, these deployments enable users to sign in once and have access to web-based applications across a number of affiliate sites. Enterprises are also now able to use federation protocols to connect their employees with benefits providers.

Today, several types of solutions help reduce the number of credentials and authentication events users encounter. SSO products enable users to re-use a single authentication across multiple applications. With SSO products, authentication credentials may be different for each application, but users aren’t required to know them.