What is a life-cycle process (LCP) in IAM, and why is CRUD its basic skeleton?
A life-cycle process manages one information object, such as an account, a password, a consent or a customer, from its creation through its changes to its deletion, so at its core it consists of create, update and delete operations (CRUD).
Every piece of identity data is born, changes and eventually has to disappear. A process landscape that only models creation produces stale data and forgotten accounts; one that forgets changes lets systems drift apart. So for every managed object you ask three questions: how is it created, how is it changed, how is it deleted? CRUD (create, read, update, delete) is the shorthand. The "read" part is the object being used by other processes (authentication reads the password); the life cycle itself is about the three writing operations.
For each operation a good LCP description pins down:
- Trigger: which business event starts it (a signed contract, a customer's request).
- Actor: who performs it (sales staff, the customer, an automatic job).
- Systems: which systems are read and written.
- Preconditions and result: what must hold before, and what state every system is in afterwards.
The Swiss IAM glossary eCH-0219 describes provisioning in the same spirit: setting up, managing and removing digital identities or user accounts, typically covering initialisation, update, deactivation and deletion. Many real deployments add that intermediate deactivated / suspended state between "active" and "deleted", so an account can be blocked and restored without losing its history.
Go deeper:
Create, read, update and delete (Wikipedia) — the four basic operations on stored data and how they map to SQL and HTTP.- eCH-0219 IAM glossary V2.0.0 — the Swiss standard defining user account, provisioning and related terms (in German).
- NIST SP 800-63A: Subscriber account suspension or termination — the events that end an account's life cycle in a real identity service.