Define and rollout reconciliation processes for access provisioning
Implementation Effort: High – Reconciliation for provisioning requires coordination between IT, identity governance, and application teams to review logs, validate external system states, and remediate inconsistencies.
User Impact: Low – These processes are administrative and do not require user involvement unless errors result in corrected access being removed or restored.
Overview
Defining and rolling out reconciliation processes for access provisioning in Microsoft Entra ID ensures that the state of user accounts and attributes in target applications remains aligned with Entra's source-of-truth data. This includes regularly validating that provisioned users are active, appropriately scoped, and contain correct attributes in external applications. Common discrepancies can include accounts not being deprovisioned due to stale scoping filters, or attribute values drifting due to manual updates outside of the provisioning flow, or local accounts.
Administrators can monitor provisioning logs in the Microsoft Entra admin center to identify anomalies, such as skipped users, attribute mismatches, or failed writes. Additional telemetry can be streamed to Azure Monitor or analyzed using workbooks to establish ongoing oversight. These reconciliation activities are particularly important for applications that manage sensitive data or enforce role-based access internally. Periodic comparison of user state between Microsoft Entra and the application—combined with reprocessing or corrective actions—ensures policy alignment and access fidelity.
This process supports the Zero Trust principle "Use least privilege access" by identifying and correcting cases where users were incorrectly provisioned or retained access beyond intended scope. Without reconciliation, overprovisioned or misaligned accounts can persist unnoticed, increasing risk of unauthorized access and audit exposure.