The fastest way to save time when onboarding and configuring across multiple vendors is to adopt an API-first automation approach. When your IT team standardizes integrations and uses a low-code orchestration platform, you can connect systems, enforce policies, and manage configurations from a single view that takes setup time from weeks to hours.
The reality is that while onboarding new tools, systems, or users shouldn’t take weeks, it does take that long for many enterprise IT teams. Particularly among the organizations managing hybrid, multi-vendor environments, integration delays are starting to look more like the rule than the exception.
As your teams roll out new SaaS platforms, provision infrastructure, or update access policies, you’ve likely hit roadblocks including fragmented APIs, inconsistent configurations, and scripts that don’t scale. Dealing with these issues not only slows time to value but also diverts engineering talent and resources away from more impactful work.
Unfortunately, the scale of the problem is only growing. The average enterprise now uses 473 SaaS applications. Every one of those apps needs to be connected, configured, and secured. When you add a new vendor, you’re also adding a layer of complexity that makes onboarding slower and more prone to error.
It’s no wonder that offboarding a single user from a company’s apps takes an average of 7.12 hours when done manually. In scenarios where you have to multiply that by thousands of employees, dozens of tools, and countless configuration changes, you could be left with serious losses in operational efficiency.
Here, we’ll explore how enterprises can speed up onboarding and configuration processes across multi-vendor environments without adding extra steps or custom code.
What is vendor sprawl?
Modern enterprises operate with diverse technologies including cloud providers, SaaS vendors, networking tools, and custom infrastructure. However, every new vendor comes with another onboarding process, which can mean another round of custom scripts, access requests, and configuration tasks. The resulting redundancies are a strong sign of vendor sprawl.
Here’s where most IT teams run into delays:
- Provisioning infrastructure for a new cloud region can stall when waiting for network approvals
- Security policies might require manual setup for each new tool
- Cross-team coordination can cause delays due to unclear ownership and limited visibility
Even seemingly straightforward tasks such as provisioning a new user or integrating a cloud service can drag on when ownership isn’t clear and processes aren’t standardized in multi-vendor environments.
This all culminates in a fragmented environment where scaling onboarding or configuration is often unsustainable. IT teams need a better way to manage integrations across multi-vendor environments while keeping security and compliance intact.
Why should I use an API-first approach?
An API-first approach means enterprises can continuously onboard at scale and add new tools or vendors without rewriting integrations.
Taking a closer look, your ideal solution will start with better integration. Intelliflow is a low-code orchestration platform designed to simplify how IT teams manage user onboarding and configure systems across multi-vendor environments.
Most platforms require extensive scripting and one-off connections. Unlike those tools, Intelliflow is built on an API-first architecture that makes integration and automation both fast and scalable:
230+ Prebuilt Integrations: Intelliflow offers out-of-the-box support for major vendors across cloud, network, SaaS, and DevOps tooling to get you up and running quickly.
15-Day SLA for New APIs: Need something new? Intelliflow’s team can guarantee new integration support within 15 business days to keep your plans on track. You don’t need to delay onboarding due to missing connectors or incompatible APIs.
API-First Architecture: Intelliflow is designed to work with your current multi-vendor environments. Whether you’re working with AWS, ServiceNow, Cisco, Okta, or others, connections happen through prebuilt workflows instead of custom code. Intelliflow merges everything into a single, centralized view to help you build fully orchestrated workflows.
What steps can I take to fast-track configuration across domains?
By following a few quick steps, your organization will be well on its way to more efficient onboarding and configuration with Intelliflow. All it takes is an initial setup of your provisioning and security policies, coordinating orchestration between teams or domains, and then extending reusable workflows to additional environments.
As you prepare to make the switch, it’s important to acknowledge that onboarding is only half the battle. Provisioning environments, enforcing policies, and aligning permissions as part of configuration can be just as time consuming. The advantage is that, once you connect a tool, Intelliflow can standardize and accelerate your configurations across a range of IT domains.
Here’s a more detailed walkthrough:
1. Set Up Provisioning and Security Policies
Use drag-and-drop workflows to define and automate environment setup, access controls, and compliance checks. These don’t require any manual scripting.
2. Build Out Cross-Team Orchestration
Coordinate onboarding actions between NetOps, DevOps, and InfraOps. At this stage, you have shared visibility and the ability to automate handoffs for effortless collaboration.
3. Adapt to Additional Environments
The low-code builder gives more teams (including less technical ones) the accessibility they need to reuse proven workflows and tailor integrations as needed.
Intelliflow removes manual intervention and unifies the three above steps. That offers major efficiency gains for organizations working in multi-vendor environments no matter how many tools or teams are involved.
Example: Scaling Without Complexity
Imagine rolling out a new security monitoring tool across multiple regions. Traditionally, onboarding this vendor would require multiple steps: set up API connections, define access policies, validate configurations, and secure approval from each domain team.
Prebuilt integrations can connect the tool automatically. You only need to establish standardized workflows once, and then you can instantly apply your security and provisioning policies to remain compliant. Configuration updates then flow between dependent systems as you orchestrate across multi-vendor environments.
What previously would have taken weeks of manual coordination now has the potential to be completed in hours with full visibility, version control, and compliance built in.
How does enterprise IT efficiency affect business performance?
Slow onboarding is an inconvenience at best. At worst, it can give your competitors the advantage. Every delay in bringing a new system online eats away at your innovation with higher costs and greater security risk.
Accelerating onboarding in multi-vendor environments results in:
- Faster innovation. Deploy new tools or services to meet business needs right away.
- Greater consistency. Every integration follows policy and security standards.
- Increased operational efficiency. Less manual oversight frees engineering teams to focus on other projects or operational bottlenecks.
Final Thoughts
As enterprises contend with increasing complexity, speed and consistency matter more than ever. Intelliflow helps enterprise IT teams onboard users and systems in record time, eliminate integration delays, orchestrate across tools and teams, and stay ahead of change with future-proof automation.
If your teams are struggling to keep up with manual onboarding and configuration cycles, it’s time to rethink your strategy.
Ready to scale your IT infrastructure and accelerate onboarding across multi-vendor environments? Book a demo today to see exactly how it works.
