User Life Cycle Management

Last Updated: August 26, 2014

Definition - What does User Life Cycle Management mean?

User Lifecycle Management (ULM) refers to a strategic solution implementation which facilitates enterprise administration of one user, one identity, and one infrastructure.

Most corporations or organizations are assigned with a standard set of technology and business data management specifications and regulations. Thus, they are aiming to employ a technique for ULM.

A successful technique must include two key factors:

Development of a standard infrastructure through which the various elements of the ULM solution can be presented, centrally configured, administered, and reported.
Replacement of various online identities with a single, safeguarded, authentic, and effectively managed credential for every user.

Techopedia explains User Life Cycle Management

ULM can be divided into five different frameworks:

Directory Services: They are considered as a software application, or a group of applications that store and organize information about the users and network shares of a computer network. Directory services let network administrators handle users’ accessibility to the shares. Furthermore, directory services serve like an abstraction layer among shared resources and users.
Operating System (OS)/Application Standardization: It is defined as a standard enterprise OS incorporated into a single image, which can be implemented to spanning multiple hardware profiles of all PCs. It is supported by a set of selected group policies and software installations. After the installation, the packaged applications as well as the OS are secured with "self-healing" technology natively incorporated if instantly modified, overwritten, or damaged.
Security: This is defined as a precise range of integrated technology and processes that are centrally integrated and administered to protect and improve end-user devices.
Asset Management: It is considered as a business discipline to manage the life cycle of assets. This is to accomplish a preferred service level while alleviating risk. Asset management features management, customer, engineering, financial, as well as other business processes. Real asset management is a business discipline empowered by people, data, process, and technology.
Audit and Compliance: It is considered as an extensive, organized, documented evaluation which is built to find and resolve financial and operational violations for individuals and companies. It includes a compliance review in addition to routine reporting needs and schedules to correct troublesome areas identified during the audit.

Benefits:

Boosts user productivity and functional efficiency while minimizing help desk workload and expenditures.
Eradicates security threats triggered from active accounts that do not have any valid owner.
Enhances overall security posture with a steady auditable method to manage identity-related routines together with a platform to help maintain compliance to regulations