misprovisioning

Misprovisioning is the incorrect allocation of resources or access within information technology systems. It typically refers to two related problems: overprovisioning (allocating more resources than necessary) and underprovisioning (insufficient resources for a workload). It also applies to identity and access management when users receive more permissions than required or are granted access to systems they should not have.

In practice, misprovisioning occurs in cloud infrastructure, virtualized environments, storage and networking, as well as in entitlement management. Causes include inaccurate workload estimation, reliance on manual provisioning, poor governance, rapidly changing demand, and failures in automation or policy controls.

Consequences include unnecessary costs from idle but paid resources, degraded performance or outages from resource starvation, and security or compliance risks from excessive privileges or incorrect access controls.

Prevention and remediation involve establishing governance and approval processes, enforcing quotas and autoscaling, implementing least-privilege access, regular audits and deprovisioning, visibility through monitoring and tagging, and automating provisioning with policy-driven controls.