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The hidden gap in user lifecycle management: Addressing mid-lifecycle changes

Bridget Willard

September 6, 2024

2 minute read

Illustration of multiple blue gears acting as a bridge.

Onboarding users to your SaaS subscriptions is a fairly simple, though tedious task. If you have 5-10 employees, it’s cool – especially if your company has a single, dedicated employee for onboarding and offboarding. For instance, managing user accounts and permissions within Google Workspace alone can be a significant burden on IT.

Then, when you start hiring employees and adding SaaS tools, your IT team can get burnt out – fast. And, onboarding is just the beginning of the user lifecycle. 

What is user lifecycle management (ULM)?

User Lifecycle Management includes provisioning (creating accounts), management (controlling their access), communication management, monitoring, and, of course, deprovisioning.

When we talk about user lifecycle management – especially mid-cycle – we’re referring to one of the most tedious chores any SaaSOps person has. If you’re that person, you know exactly what we’re talking about. You get an email from a department head or HR and they’re already rushing you. We know your pain.

What is a mid-lifecycle change?

A mid-lifecycle change is when an organization’s employee is promoted and needs expanded access and updated permissions. So, when Janet becomes a Senior Accountant II, she can now override errors while reconciling the bank accounts. Harold got promoted to DevRel so he can now invite people to the Slack Community.

So when it comes to mid-lifecycle changes, you can’t just get by with a few scrips and API calls. When your tech startup starts expanding because of that sweet, sweet seed money, your IT department might freak out if you promote ten people in a day. Just sayin’.

So, what’s the solution?

You need a robust ULM workflow that addresses mid-lifecycle changes

There are other ULM solutions out there. We’ll admit it. But BetterCloud stands out. We’ve built BetterCloud to be a SaaS management platform with the specific needs of SaaSOps teams in mind.

We know that SaaSOps folks struggle with mid-cycle changes. Sadly, most SMPs (SaaS Management Platforms) do not have the ability to automate mid-lifecycle changes. Manual changes mean more frustration for IT and end users, procrastination in task prioritization, and more expense from the IT budget.

Automated workflow of org unit membership changes in BetterCloud

With BetterCloud, you don’t need to wait for an email or a dreaded phone call from HR in order to address mid-lifecycle changes. Simply set up a workflow based on the trigger: any user’s Org Unit membership changes. The workflow does the rest. You can even set it to pause and wait for approval. Easy. Done.

BetterCloud answered the most problems for us. It was the solution that could save our team time and effort. It aligned with the way the IT team was looking to automate and streamline processes.”
Steve Foley, Senior IT Automation Engineer at Seismic

You automate everything else, why not user lifecycle management, too?

BetterCloud is so much more than just a user lifecycle management tool. It automates employee onboarding & offboarding, license reclamation, spend management, application access, and entitlement. 

Eliminate thousands of hours of manual IT work and thousands of dollars in wasted software expenses with BetterCloud.

What are you waiting for?