Authoritative and Non-Authoritative Data Sources
The enterprise systems that provide information about identities and their access may be numerous, and information about identities may not always be synchronized across all systems. For this reason, some sources of data are designated as authoritative sources. An authoritative source is any repository for employee information for your enterprise that represents the primary and most trusted information about identities, such as a human resources application. This is in contrast to non-authoritative sources that may contain some accurate information about identities but is not considered the system of record for information about the identity itself.
A simple example is when an employee's name changes – Pat Smith becomes Pat Jones. In this example, Human Resources will change the employee's name, and perhaps the email address, in an authoritative source, such as Active Directory. The changes then need to be propagated out to other accounts that the user has, such as JIRA, Sales Force, Outlook, etc.
A system is designated as an authoritative source by checking the Authoritative Application flag in the application configuration for that source.
Note that your organization can have multiple authoritative sources.