IAM Automation: How App Access Works With Identity Providers

You deployed Okta or JumpCloud, expecting IAM automation to handle app access. Instead, you're the human routing layer between Slack requests, manager approvals, and manual provisioning.

The gap between identity management and actual access automation costs IT teams 10+ hours a week in manual coordination that scales with every new hire and role change.

This article breaks down what identity providers actually automate versus what falls to you, where automated process flows fill the gap, and how to stop being the middleman for every access request.

TL;DR

• Identity providers handle authentication and basic provisioning but leave request intake, approval routing, and compliance reporting to manual coordination.
• Most mid-sized organizations maintain manual coordination points even with IDPs deployed, with only a small fraction automating all aspects of onboarding.
• The JML lifecycle involves multiple distinct manual handoff points spanning HR notification, application configuration, role changes, and deprovisioning.
• Manual access management creates direct compliance violations across NIST, ISO 27001, and SOC 2 frameworks that auditors will document as control deficiencies.
• An orchestration layer extends your existing IDP into full workflow automation without replacing your identity infrastructure.

What Does IAM Automation Actually Mean?

Identity management means using technology to manage who gets access to what, without manual work at every step. The goal is straightforward: the right people get the right resources at the right time, with a clear reason documented for every decision.

For growing companies, this should mean automated systems that create identities, manage access throughout the employee lifecycle, and apply role-based controls without your intervention.

Here's the problem: most IAM definitions describe the destination without acknowledging the gap between your IDP and actual workflow automation. Your identity provider delivers authentication and basic authorization. The request intake, approval routing, cross-departmental coordination, and audit logging? That's still your inbox.

Why Doesn't Your Identity Provider Automate App Access Workflows?

Identity providers automate the mechanical execution of provisioning and deprovisioning for federated applications. They don't automate the business processes that determine who gets access, when, and why.

JumpCloud supports SCIM-based provisioning and deprovisioning, where admins bind users to applications through group membership and account lifecycle changes sync automatically. Okta lets requesters submit access requests through self-service portals without IT intervention for standard requests.

This sounds like automation. But critical manual processes remain:

Application-specific limitations: Most IDPs offer self-service access request portals, but they fall short when applications require custom attributes or complex entitlement structures. If your apps don't fit the standard template, those requests skip automation entirely and land back in your queue for manual processing.

Privileged access management: Managing admin role requests requires that request assignees sign in as super admin to the Admin Console to view pending requests. Automation doesn't extend to privileged access regardless of your policy configuration.

Hybrid identity conflicts: For hybrid identity environments, when a user is managed by Microsoft Entra Connect, the source of authority is on-premises Active Directory Domain Services. If you're running hybrid identity, you're manually coordinating between systems.

The translation: your IDP handles technical provisioning once someone tells it what to do. You're figuring out what should happen, routing approvals, and coordinating across departments.

Where Do Manual Gaps Appear in the JML Lifecycle?

The Joiner-Mover-Leaver lifecycle is where IDP coverage ends, and your manual coordination begins. The GSA's Identity Lifecycle Management guidance defines JML as the stages of digital identity from creation to deactivation.

Your IDP automates technical provisioning at each stage. The business coordination across IT, HR, Finance, and Security? That happens through a fragmented "three-tool stack": Slack message for intake, spreadsheets for tracking, and email for routing. This creates audit trail gaps your IDP cannot address.

Onboarding

When new employees join, your IDP can provision accounts based on role templates. But you're still coordinating multi-step approval workflows.

HR creates the employee record. You don't automatically know the start date or required access unless someone tells you. Manager must confirm additional access needs. Finance may need to approve licenses. You provision once all approvals arrive via email.

Internal Role Changes

Internal role changes create the most coordination overhead. Previous managers must confirm which access was role-specific versus individual exceptions. New managers must approve additional access.

Here's what that looks like in practice: a marketing coordinator moves to product management. You need to:

• Revoke Marketo and HubSpot access that was specific to the old role
• Confirm whether their Figma license transfers or gets reassigned
• Get the new manager to approve Jira and Confluence access
• Check with Finance on any license cost differences
• Provision everything once approvals trickle in through Slack

You must interpret these business decisions and translate them into technical entitlements. Each role change requires judgment about business context that your IDP can't provide.

Movers generate a disproportionate share of access coordination burden. Each change can trigger access modifications across 10-20+ applications, with you manually determining what stays, what goes, and what's new. Your IDP can't interpret lateral transfers, temporary assignments, dual roles, or matrix management structures. You're the coordination layer.

Offboarding

HR owns the employee file. Legal owns the compliance layer. IT owns device collection and system access. Security owns risk and monitoring. Without tight coordination, gaps appear; a departure email might go out before permissions are revoked.

Your IDP can deactivate accounts when triggered, but determining when to trigger deprovisioning requires coordination across four departments with different priorities and timelines. Without automated access workflows, each step requires manual tracking and follow-up across multiple teams.

These manual handoffs are manageable when you're the only IT person handling 50 requests a month. When your company crosses 200 employees and your team grows to 3-5 people, the same broken process runs in parallel across multiple agents with no standardization. With automated orchestration, every agent on your team follows the same workflow, approvals route through the same logic, and nothing depends on who happened to pick up the request.

How Does Fragmented Approval Tracking Create Compliance Risk?

When approval workflows happen outside your IDP, your audit trail fragments across three places:

• Authentication events log in your IDP
• Approval decisions live in email or ticketing systems
• Provisioning actions sit in application-specific logs

And that's just the access you know about. When approval workflows are slow or unclear, employees work around them, signing up for tools directly with a work email and never looping in IT. This shadow IT creates access that doesn't appear in any log, because it never touched your approval process in the first place.

This fragmentation creates violations within SOC 2 and ISO 27001 frameworks. NIST Special Publication 800-53 specifically requires documented approval chains and audit logging under its AC-2 Account Management control. When your approval decisions live in Slack threads and spreadsheets, they lack the immutability and technical enforcement auditors expect.

When auditors ask "Who approved this person's access to Salesforce?", you're hunting through IDP logs, email threads, and spreadsheets to reconstruct the answer. This manual reconstruction often takes hours per access review, and incomplete documentation leads to repeat audit findings.

The time cost compounds when you're preparing for quarterly reviews or annual compliance certifications, work that could be eliminated with unified audit logging.

What Does an Access Orchestration Layer Add?

Think of an orchestration layer as the workflow brain that sits between your employees and your identity provider. Your IDP knows how to create accounts and assign groups. The orchestration layer decides when that should happen, who needs to approve it, and how to prove it later.

In practice, core orchestration capabilities include access certifications, access request workflow automation, entitlement management, and identity lifecycle fulfillment.

This lets you automatically route requests through multi-level approval chains, coordinate provisioning across applications, enforce separation of duty policies, and manage time-bound access with automatic expiration.

Multi-step approval automation: Orchestration layers route requests to managers, system owners, and compliance teams with SLA tracking and escalation. When approvals stall, the system automatically escalates rather than leaving requests stuck in someone's inbox.

Cross-system provisioning: When onboarding requires Okta, Jamf, Slack, and Google Workspace access, orchestration handles verification and tracking across all systems through native app connectors.

Centralized audit logging: Consolidates fragmented records into a unified access lifecycle audit trail for compliance documentation. Every request, approval, and provisioning action links together in a single searchable record.

Time-bound access management: Contractor access, temporary project permissions, and elevated privileges automatically expire based on configured policies. No calendar reminders or manual revocation required.

These orchestration capabilities exist across several platforms, but most are built for enterprise security teams with dedicated identity governance staff. For IT teams at growing companies who need workflow automation without a six-month implementation, the approach looks different.

How Siit Extends Your Identity Provider

Siit is Slack-native, so employees request access without leaving their workflow. When someone asks for Salesforce access in Slack, Siit orchestrates the full chain:

• Pulls employee data from your HRIS
• Routes approval to their manager with full context
• Checks budget approval with Finance
• Provisions access through your IDP
• Creates the compliance audit trail linking every step

Every action is logged with full agent logs, so you always know what happened and why. No black box automation.

Siit doesn't replace your Okta or Entra ID investment. It adds the access request tracking and approval workflows your IDP doesn't provide. Your IDP handles authentication and technical provisioning. Siit handles everything between "I need access" and "access granted."

What takes hours per week of manual coordination (routing requests, chasing approvals, updating spreadsheets) becomes automated for 90% of routine requests. Requests flow from Slack to approval to provisioning without you in the middle.

For solo IT managers, this means routine requests route automatically, automated app workflows trigger without manual credential creation, and actions log across integrated systems.

Extend Your IDP Into Full App Access Automation

Identity providers handle authentication and technical provisioning. They don't handle request intake, approval routing, cross-departmental coordination, or unified audit logging. The manual work filling this gap consumes IT capacity that should go toward strategic projects.

Siit adds the orchestration layer that turns manual access workflows into automated provisioning. Your IDP remains the identity foundation while Siit automates everything between the access request and the provisioning action. 

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