It’s Monday morning, and a new hire is walking into the office for their first day. Before they can dive into the work, they need access to email, project management tools, cloud storage, and a dozen other SaaS apps their role depends on. IT has already been hard at work behind the scenes, provisioning accounts, assigning permissions, and making sure everything is ready the moment they sign in.
Fast forward to their last day at the company. The same IT team is racing through a different checklist: revoking access, reassigning files, and ensuring no lingering accounts become a security risk. These bookend moments are only part of a much bigger process that IT teams manage every day to keep work moving and data secure. That process is called user lifecycle management, and it’s critical for protecting sensitive data, preventing costly security gaps, and keeping the organization running smoothly.
Try Auvik SaaS Management now
Take the first step in reclaiming control over your SaaS environment.
What is the user lifecycle?
The user lifecycle is the complete journey of an individual’s access to an organization’s systems and applications, from the moment their first account is created to the point every permission is revoked. In a SaaS-driven workplace, this lifecycle spans onboarding, role changes, and offboarding, with each stage involving the setup, modification, or removal of access across multiple tools. For IT teams, it’s both a logistical process and a security responsibility, ensuring the right people have the right access at the right time, and no one keeps it longer than they should.
5 stages of the user lifecycle
Every user’s journey follows a similar pattern, whether they’re a short-term contractor or a long-term team member. For IT, each stage comes with its own tasks, tools, and risks to watch for. Managing them well helps keep operations smooth and data secure.
1. Employee onboarding
Employee onboarding is where the user’s accounts, permissions, and access are first created. In a SaaS-heavy environment, that could mean provisioning licenses across dozens of platforms, from communication tools to industry-specific software. IT should focus on efficiency here: the faster users are fully set up, the sooner they can be productive. Automated provisioning through user lifecycle management software can reduce manual effort, prevent missed tools, and provide a consistent, secure setup process.
2. Role changes
When someone’s responsibilities shift, their access needs to change with them. This might mean adding new SaaS tools, adjusting permissions, or removing access to systems they no longer use. Without timely updates, you risk both bottlenecks (if access is too limited) and security issues (if it’s too broad). Regular access reviews and role-based access controls can keep permissions aligned with actual job needs.
3. Employee offboarding
The final day of an employee’s time at your organization is a critical security checkpoint. During employee offboarding, IT must revoke all SaaS and system access immediately, reassign files or accounts, and ensure no lingering logins remain active. Overlooking a single app can create a shadow access point for data leaks or unauthorized use. A documented, automated SaaS offboarding process helps ensure nothing is missed, especially in organizations with large or remote teams.
4. Auditing & compliance
Even when no one is actively joining or leaving, IT needs to regularly verify who has access to what. This stage is about identifying inactive accounts, unused licenses, or permissions that have drifted over time. Auditing supports compliance requirements, reduces unnecessary SaaS spend, and ensures access policies are being followed.
5. Re-provisioning or reactivation
Sometimes former employees return, contractors come back, or seasonal workers rejoin. In these cases, IT can save time by reactivating accounts or re-provisioning access, but only after confirming credentials are secure and permissions are still appropriate. This stage benefits from clear records of previous access and standardized provisioning workflows.
The importance of user lifecycle management
When IT teams can’t track who should have access, which tools they’re using, or when permissions should change, the result is security gaps, wasted time, and unnecessary spending. Effective user lifecycle management offers clarity and control across every stage of access, helping teams stay both efficient and secure.
Here’s why it matters:
- Reduces security risks: Every account left active after someone leaves is a potential entry point for cyber threats. A survey by Beyond Identity found that 91% of employees still had access to company files after being offboarded, and 29% of organizations have lost confidential data due to ineffective offboarding.
- Improves operational efficiency: According to Gartner, the average desk worker uses 11 apps every day to get work done. For 40% of employees, that number is even higher, and 5% juggle more than 26. Without automation, keeping all those accounts accurate and up to date can quickly overwhelm IT teams.
- Supports better SaaS decisions: Without visibility into usage, organizations often waste money on licenses no one touches. One study found that nearly half (49.96%) of all installed software goes unused by employees, based on data from over six million customer environments. With accurate usage insights, IT can right-size licenses, cut redundancies, and avoid the risks of randomly shutting down tools that may still be critical.
- Increases visibility across the SaaS stack: 53% of IT teams say they lack complete visibility into their technology assets, which makes it harder to know who has access to what. Without that clarity, it’s nearly impossible to manage the user lifecycle effectively. This is when unused accounts go unnoticed, redundant tools pile up, and compliance gaps widen.
- Controls costs through centralization: Centralizing SaaS operations and access management helps identify unused licenses and eliminate redundancy, leading to cost savings. For example, many knowledge workers use multiple apps for the same purpose, with one study stating that roughly 37% of employees use three browser apps to access SaaS tools and the internet, and 31% use two or more collaboration tools.
Common challenges in the user lifecycle for IT teams
Even with a clear process, managing the user account lifecycle isn’t simple, especially in an environment heavily reliant on SaaS, where apps are constantly being added, changed, or retired. Without proper visibility, these are some of the most common pitfalls IT teams face:
1. Incomplete or delayed offboarding
When an employee leaves, every active account becomes a potential security risk. Without a centralized view of all SaaS tools in use, it’s easy to miss a license, especially for apps that were adopted at the department level without IT’s oversight. This leads to orphaned accounts, compliance issues, and unnecessary spend.
2. SaaS sprawl
Shadow IT and decentralized purchasing mean new tools can appear without formal onboarding into IT’s systems. Over time, the organization ends up with overlapping apps, inconsistent permissions, and higher costs. Without SaaS discovery tools, IT can’t effectively manage access or ensure policies apply across the stack.
3. Manual provisioning and deprovisioning
Without automation, creating, updating, and removing accounts requires significant manual work. This slows down onboarding, creates bottlenecks during role changes, and increases the chance of human error — whether that’s missing a tool or assigning the wrong permissions.
4. Role drift and outdated permissions
As employees change responsibilities, their access often changes too, and not always in a controlled way. Without regular access reviews, users can accumulate permissions they no longer need, increasing security risks and making compliance audits more difficult. If a customer service employee is promoted to the marketing team, for example, they might still retain access to sensitive customer information that they don’t need, creating an unnecessary vulnerability.
5. Lack of usage insights
Without clear data on who’s using what, IT teams are left guessing which tools are essential and which are wasted spend. This lack of visibility leads to over-provisioning, under-utilization, and missed opportunities to reassign or retire unused licenses.
How to manage the user lifecycle effectively
Strong user lifecycle management starts with a consistent, repeatable process. While every organization’s setup will look a little different, these high-level steps can help IT teams strengthen security, improve efficiency, and keep SaaS access under control.
Step One: Centralize SaaS visibility
You can’t manage what you can’t see. Start by creating a complete inventory of every SaaS application in use, whether IT provisioned it or not. This gives you a single source of truth for all user accounts, permissions, and license usage. With this visibility, IT can spot orphaned accounts, identify unused licenses, and ensure policies are applied consistently across the stack.
Step Two: Standardize onboarding and offboarding
Every new hire should follow the same onboarding process, and every departing employee should follow the same offboarding checklist. Standardized user onboarding and offboarding ensures that access is provisioned quickly, permissions are appropriate for the role, and accounts are revoked promptly when no longer needed. Documented workflows also make it easier to delegate tasks, track completion, and ensure nothing slips through the cracks.
Step Three: Automate provisioning and deprovisioning
Manual account management is time-consuming. Automating onboarding, role changes, and offboarding reduces the risk of missed tools, incorrect permissions, and lingering accounts. It also speeds up the process, allowing employees to start work on day one and ensuring access is removed the moment it’s no longer required.
Step Four: Conduct regular access reviews
User permissions can drift over time. Schedule periodic reviews (quarterly, for example) to verify that access levels match current job responsibilities. This practice helps maintain least-privilege principles, reduce the attack surface, and stay prepared for compliance audits.
Step Five: Monitor license usage and right-size regularly
Unused or underused licenses drain budgets and clutter the SaaS stack. By tracking usage data and identifying inactive accounts, IT can reassign licenses, retire redundant tools, and prioritize investments in applications that deliver the most value. This keeps costs under control while ensuring employees have the tools they truly need.
How Auvik SaaS management supports the user lifecycle
Managing the user lifecycle effectively starts with visibility, and that’s exactly where Auvik SaaS Management delivers value. With Auvik, IT teams can see every application in use across the organization, even those adopted at the department level without IT’s involvement. This insight makes it easy to track exactly who has access to what, whether by individual employee, role, or team, so nothing gets overlooked.
Over time, Auvik helps IT spot underused or unused licenses, identify orphaned accounts left behind after offboarding, and surface potential risks before they become problems. When an employee leaves, you can instantly see every SaaS tool they accessed, ensuring their accounts are closed quickly and completely. The result is a user lifecycle process that’s faster, more accurate, and less risky, with less manual effort for IT.
Ready to strengthen your user lifecycle management? Schedule a demo to see how Auvik SaaS Management can help.
Try Auvik SaaS Management now
Take the first step in reclaiming control over your SaaS environment.
User lifecycle management FAQs
What’s the difference between the user lifecycle and the SaaS lifecycle?
The user lifecycle refers to the stages of an individual’s access to systems and applications, from onboarding to offboarding. The SaaS lifecycle focuses on the lifecycle of the software itself, from procurement and deployment to renewal or retirement. While related, one is user-centric and the other is application-centric.
How can Auvik SaaS Management help with onboarding and offboarding?
Auvik provides visibility into every SaaS app an employee uses, making it easier to provision the right tools on day one and revoke all access when they leave. This reduces onboarding delays, prevents orphaned accounts, and ensures security at every stage of the user access lifecycle.
How can IT teams gain visibility into SaaS app usage across the user lifecycle?
Using a SaaS discovery and management platform like Auvik allows IT to see every application in use, track license activity, and monitor usage trends over time. This ensures IT always knows who is using what and can adjust access as roles change or employees leave.
