Manual Provisioning Wastes 500+ Hours a Year, But Automation Gives It Back

When I recently spoke to our customer, RevenueBase, founder and CEO Mark Feldman dropped a number that’s hard to ignore:

“Onboarding team members used to take about an hour… now it’s a couple of minutes.”

‍With their provisioning and deprovisioning reduced by 95%, identity lifecycle management time is a fraction of what it was. Even for a small company, say a team of just ten, IT would save a staggering 9.5 hours on onboarding alone.

This got me thinking: What could an IT security team do with that extra time?

Here are some thoughts for those 9.5 hours. A drop in the ocean:

Test and document the backup and restore process
Run a full backup verification and a partial data-restore test to prove it works. Note how long it takes, what failed, and what would break in a real emergency.

Update patch management and OS images
Apply pending updates to servers, endpoints, and network appliances. Refresh base images so future deployments start secure, not six months behind.

Improve network visibility and documentation
Map your current infrastructure, update diagrams, and annotate what’s actually in use versus what’s legacy. You’ll thank yourself during the next outage.

Clean up monitoring alerts and thresholds
Review recurring alerts that everyone ignores. Adjust thresholds, tune noise, and make sure the alerts that do fire actually matter.

Run an internal system health check
Check storage capacity, CPU load, and network performance trends. Spot creeping issues — the kind that turn into “urgent” later — and fix them now.

Standardize device builds and configurations
Bring laptops, servers, and cloud VMs in line with approved templates. It reduces user pain, support tickets, and those “it works on my machine” moments.

Prepare and run (probably two) internal cybersecurity trainingsUpdate content with current threats and policies, tailor for the audience, deliver a one-hour live session with interactive demos, then follow up with a quiz, summary materials, and compliance reporting. 

Document tribal knowledge
Capture key fixes, quirks, and workarounds that live in the team’s heads. Write them up into a shared internal wiki before someone takes a holiday.

Review vendor and subscription sprawl
Audit licenses, SaaS tools, and maintenance contracts. Cancel what’s unused, consolidate where possible, and note renewal dates to avoid surprise invoices.

Run a mini training or knowledge-share session
Use the time to upskill the team — maybe a short workshop on PowerShell automation, endpoint management, or new M365 security features. A small investment that pays back daily.

Or, y’know, it takes about four minutes to make a proper cup of coffee. Grind the beans, boil the water, pour, stir, maybe even froth a bit if you’re feeling fancy. So that’s roughly 142 cups of coffee. Enough to fuel a small newsroom or one particularly determined cybersecurity writer on deadline.

Crunching The Numbers‍

Manual provisioning drains resources, typically costing companies over 500 hours a year, and IT departments spend up to 30% of their time manually managing identities [Forrester], which is roughly equivalent to one staff member working three months full-time. Automating onboarding and access cuts delays, strengthens compliance, and reduces human error. It frees IT teams to focus on strategic work while scaling effortlessly as users and apps grow. In short, it lets you do more with less and the ROI is undeniable.

Time is a big factor for IT departments, and anything that simplifies life has to be a plus. 9.5 hours is just onboarding ten people; it doesn’t allow for all the offboarding, fiddly day-to-day shenanigans, reporting, wrangling access creep, and “Can you just?”. In a discipline where the talent gap is widening, staffing is an ongoing headache, and every minute counts, the future is just-in-time automation and a single straightforward interface across all cloud platforms.

No wonder Mark at RevenueBase was happy. The numbers speak for themselves.

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