The SCIM Tax forces IT teams into a difficult choice. They can pay the enormous Enterprise upgrade to access basic security features, or they can handle provisioning and deprovisioning manually for apps like Figma, Notion, and Adobe on their own.
To avoid this manual work, IT professionals look for alternative solutions. They quickly turn to two technical dead ends:
- Brittle, homegrown scripts: Time-consuming to build, impossible to maintain, and break every time a vendor updates their UI.
- Heuristic "AI Agents": Unpredictable, non-deterministic, and too risky for access management where a mistake could grant unauthorized access or leave a critical security hole.
To truly defeat the SCIM Tax, IT needs a solution that provides the security and auditability of a native SCIM integration. Stitchflow built it. We deliver that capability using secure headless browsers that execute the same provisioning and deprovisioning actions a human admin would, but with the resilience of an API and the safety and guardrails of a SCIM integration. It required building a platform on one non-negotiable principle: Automation without compromise.
Here is a look inside the three security and resilience layers Stitchflow built to deliver SCIM-grade automation, guaranteed to be safer and more resilient than any manual process.
Layer 1: Deterministic security over guesswork (core to secure provisioning automation)
The biggest technical challenge in automating a UI is ensuring the system always does the right thing. Since an action in an identity workflow has security consequences, we explicitly rejected the trendy approach of using AI, heuristics, or machine learning-driven "agents". You cannot audit a guess; you need deterministic proof.
The Stitchflow deterministic difference:
- Pre-validated Flow: Every action (keystroke, click, validation) is explicitly scripted and pre-validated. There is no guessing or pathfinding.
- Hard-Coded Validation: Every run includes critical hard-coded checks. For example, before deactivating a user, the system confirms the exact target email appears in the deactivation modal. If the UI shifts or the wrong user appears, the system immediately halts.
- The Guardrail Principle: If there is any doubt, the automation stops. This prevents unauthorized or unintended actions and ensures our audit logs are clean and precise.
This deterministic reliability is the same foundation behind our SCIM uptime model.
Layer 2: Isolated environments and zero data exposure
Any conversation about "browser automation" must first address the fear of credential exposure and data leakage. We architected the platform to neutralize this risk, making the environment safer than an admin running a browser locally.
Credential and data isolation:
- Isolated Containers: Each integration runs in its own dedicated, headless browser instance, spun up on demand in an isolated container within our private GCP Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). There is zero cross-tenant access.
- API-Grade Credential Vaulting: All secrets are AES-256 encrypted and stored externally in GCP Secret Manager or 1Password. Credentials are only injected at runtime and are never seen or stored persistently in the execution environment.
- Proxy, Not Database: Stitchflow executes actions but never stores or processes user PII beyond what is required for the execution. We are a secure proxy, not a data warehouse.
- SOC 2 Type II Certified: Our entire process is governed by SOC 2 Type II certification, providing the independent assurance your security team needs.
Layer 3: Guaranteeing resilience with human-in-the-loop (HITL)
Deterministic automation is safe, but real-world applications break all the time (MFA, CAPTCHA, unannounced UI changes). This is the key reason why internal scripts ultimately fail.
Stitchflow solves this with our 24/7 Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) system—the operational backbone that guarantees our 99.5% uptime SLA.
Security in the Human Loop:
- Immediate Halt & Alert: When an anomaly is detected (e.g., an MFA prompt or a layout change), the automation immediately pauses and alerts our 24/7 on-call engineering team.
- Sandboxed Access: The human operator intervenes in a controlled, temporary, and isolated sandboxed environment. Crucially, the credentials are automatically injected from the vault and never visible to the engineer.
- Full Audit Trail: Every single human action is recorded with the Operator ID, timestamp, and a full video capture for audit review. This provides verifiable proof for compliance and security teams.
Related read: How we architected browser automation to be as secure as an API
Fully managed and resilient browser automation is the only antidote to the SCIM Tax
When vendors hide SCIM behind a paywall, they force you into a manual, insecure, and un-auditable workflow.
Stitchflow flips that equation. We deliver the same structured, API-like output that Okta or Entra expects, backed by enterprise-grade security and full video evidence for every action.
We took the riskiest form of automation and built it into the most secure and resilient system for identity governance. Stop choosing between an expensive SCIM plan and a brittle script. Choose guaranteed, auditable automation.
Ready for secure provisioning automation that never breaks?
You shouldn’t have to choose between expensive SCIM plans and brittle scripts. Stitchflow delivers secure provisioning automation for every app — SCIM or not — with guaranteed uptime.
Book a demo and see secure provisioning automation in action.
Frequently asked questions
Secure provisioning automation is the ability to create, update, and deactivate user accounts automatically with the same guarantees as a native SCIM integration—deterministic logic, audit-grade logs, isolated execution, and zero credential exposure. Stitchflow delivers this even for apps without SCIM or APIs.
As Stitchflow's Co-founder and Operations & Customer Success leader, Shankar has spent 3 years as a de facto member of IT teams - learning exactly how they manage the imperfect stack they inherit and what makes automation actually work for them.
