In telecommunication, provisioning is the act of acquiring telecommunications service from the submission of the requirement through the activation of service.

Note 1: Provisioning includes all associated transmission, wiring, and equipment.

Note 2: In NS/EP telecommunication services, "provisioning" equates to "initiation" and includes altering the state of an existing priority service or capability.

Source: From Federal Standard 1037C

The concept of provisioning has spread to more general information technology tasks, not just those associated with telecommunications services and infrastructure:

• Server provisioning refers to selecting a server from a pool of available servers; loading the appropriate software (operating system, device drivers, middleware, and applications); appropriately customizing and configuring the system, software, and associated network and storage resources; then finally starting the server and its newly-loaded software. This makes the system ready for operation.
• User provisioning refers to the maintenance of records corresponding to employees, customers or other recipients of a service (such as electronic mail) in a directory service or similar database for use by identity management software.
• "Provisioning" often appears in the context of virtualization, orchestration, and other dynamic datacenter concepts.