Today’s businesses are up against multiple challenges to remain agile yet compliant. However, employees and partner ecosystems, require access  to enterprise data and applications to perform their jobs. How, therefore, can organizations control and manage access to business-critical applications ensuring people have access only to the resources they need?

As well as addressing the challenge of regulatory compliance, businesses require operational agility to ensure they can respond to both opportunities and threats. Traditional GRC and IGA solutions can no longer fulfil complex business requirements. Forward-thinking organizations are looking at modern, innovative integrated solutions that allow them to focus on the business.

In this blog, we’re going to look at how  automate user access review allows for this to happen. Today’s organizations face ongoing and growing pressure to continuously prove compliance in real-time. The increasing number of regulatory compliance initiatives around the world have pushed organizations to prioritize access and demonstrate they know and can prove who has access to what, if access is appropriate and what they are doing with the access they have.

Organizations are required to govern access to systems, and applications, comply with multiple regulatory compliance legislations and protect sensitive data. Giving someone more access than they need to perform their job can have drastic consequences. Insider threats are real and organizations must take steps to ensure appropriate access and zero trust.

Organizations must not only understand who has access to what but be able to validate that someone’s access is appropriate. This is where automating access certifications can help. By using an automated access certification solution, businesses have a clear understanding of user access.

Having an effective technology solution for automating user access review can provide an outstanding comprehension of which users have access to specific resources by filtering and consolidating entitlement data throughout the organization. This will also provide reporting on user access across all enterprise systems and applications. By using an automated solution, both accuracy and authentication of access reviews will speed and increase.

Additionally, an effective solution will allow decision makers to repeal inappropriate access. In return, the enterprise will enforce policies in the areas of segregation of duties and least privilege. Lastly, having an implemented access solution will provide audit trail reports to give evidence that access has been reviewed and essentially corrected.

Access certification is crucial when it comes to avoiding access violations. Without access certification, the risk of security breaches increases. Regularly scheduled access reviews allow users to be assigned only the necessary amount of access to perform their jobs. Access reviews  triggered when someone moves department, changes job role, or leaves an organization corroborate employees do not accumulate access while with the organization as well as ensure both internal and external employees’ access does not preserve after termination with the organization.

An enterprise’s ability to improve reach while simultaneously managing business risk is the foundation of identity and access management (IAM). Automating Access certification sparks initiatives in this area in many ways. It is responsible for consolidating and correlating identity and access data, which can be used in user provisioning and role management. Access certification filters the consolidated data, which leaves a sturdy, trustworthy foundation to develop upon.

With a successful access certification solution, an organization should notice a completely automated certification process as well as ensure ongoing tracking and reporting for audit. The solution should automate the following tasks:

1. Schedule and monitor manager and application-owner certifications in correspondence with business priorities to keep reviews on schedule.

2. Track access modifications regularly to guarantee appropriate IT infrastructure changes are made.

3. Import and correlate entitlement data from IT infrastructure from business-critical applications and filter data from multiple sources into a single source.

Generate reports that notify administrators on existing or possible violations, remediation, and exceptions to remain compliant with organization requirements.

An access certification solution should be an integral piece of a company’s user provisioning and role management processes. This will enable a successful closed-loop management of security policy violations and the corresponding access revocations. Having a complete life-cycle approach will make the following possible:

1. Efficient and effective removal of access that violates policies while retrieving relevant audit information. 

2. Increase compliance by remaining within the defined business roles based on appropriate access. 

3. Use business roles to assign, attest, and audit access.

Finding the correct vendor to implement the right access certification solution is important. A worthy vendor should:

1. Have deep knowledge of core identity challenges, processes, and solutions

2. Provide expertise in compliance management as well as user provisioning, and role management. 

3. Demonstrate the understanding and ability to productively address challenges in Web access management and secure Web services. 

4. Demonstrate and provide expertise in its service offering that will guide you through the process to develop an effective identity infrastructure. 

SafePaaS Access Monitor™ (user access certification) for the enterprise makes it easy to manage and control access and keep the auditors at bay. Automating the process not only replaces a manual time-consuming task but ensures compliance. Automating access reviews can save you hundreds of hours on manual reviews of access role assignments and privileges within your business-critical applications. Contact us to see how we are helping the world’s leading organizations streamline and automate access certification across multiple business applications.