Self-Provisioning

Definition - What does Self-Provisioning mean?

Self-provisioning, commonly known as the cloud self-service, is a feature among many cloud service providers which allows their end users to provision resources by themselves, and set up or launch a service or application without the intervention of dedicated IT personnel or the service providers themselves. This gives users greater freedom in using services within the bounds set by the provider.

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Techopedia explains Self-Provisioning

Public cloud providers can offer self-provisioning through the Internet using Web applications and other third-party partners that the provider may have, although most cloud providers have in-house provisioning tools working at the back-end to provide this service. In enterprise situations, a company may opt to create its own proprietary portal in conjunction with the provider, or simply provide specifications for the provider to follow that other business units can access and use to provision resources like storage and virtual machines for their own use.

Self-provisioning is great to a point. It allows users across the organization to be self-sufficient and it saves time compared to the old requisition method, which could take hours depending on whether IT personnel are busy with more urgent tasks or queued up with similar requests. However, users who self-provision must also learn to deprovision to free up resources when they're no longer in use.