Access Certification: Process, Risks & Best Practices Explained
An essential part of any IAM strategy, access certification ensures that access rights remain up-to-date and appropriate to each user’s role within the organization. By validating that current access authorizations meet business, security and compliance needs, access certification decreases the risk of breaches, data theft or regulatory violations.
What Is Access Certification?
Access certification refers to the process of checking current access privileges in an organization to confirm that each user can only access apps and resources that are necessary for their job function. This enables organizations to minimize user access and follow the principle of least privilege โ a security best practice that reduces the risk unauthorized access.
Access certification is closely related to user access reviews, another term for recurring privilege audits that help businesses identify and remove unnecessary permissions. The two terms are sometimes used synonymously, though access certification also includes setup steps such as inventorying access privileges in the organization.
Executive Summary:
Access certification is required to achieve regulatory compliance and minimize risks such as data theft, insider threats or account compromise.
Complex IT environments with dozens of applications make it challenging to keep track of access privileges without a dedicated governance platform.
IGA solutions enable organizations to certify access with minimal effort or IT involvement.
Access Certification Process
Certifying access is a multi-step process. To go from preparing audits to reviewing permissions and implementing changes, these are the steps you need to know.
Inventory privileges: To certify access, you first need to know which privileges your users hold across different systems and resources. This requires an up-to-date inventory of IT assets and user privileges.
Establish policy: Access certification is only one part of a larger access control strategy and should be governed by an access control policy. This policy details how certification is carried out in your organization, including security goals, review intervals and documenting outcomes.
Designate reviewers: In order to re-certify user access, reviewers must be familiar with both the user and resource in question. The best approach is to involve stakeholders within departments, which improves audit accuracy and reduces the strain on your IT department.
Certify access: Now it’s finally time to audit user access. To achieve this, you must notify reviewers, provide them with a list of tasks to accomplish and track the overall completion of your access certification.
Implement changes: If certification has uncovered unnecessary access rights, the last step is to revoke any outdated privileges. Regardless of their result, audit outcomes must be documented to ensure transparency.
From mapping out access privileges to creating audit checklists for reviewers, access certification is incredibly time-consuming โ unless you automate the process through Identity Governance & Administration.
Which Regulations and Standards Require Access Certification?
| Standard | Requirement for Access Recertification |
|---|---|
| GDPR | Access to personal data must be limited to authorized individuals whose job requires access. Regular reviews are necessary to ensure this requirement is met. Source: GDPR Article 5 |
| HIPAA | Access to protected health information (PHI) must be limited to authorized individuals whose job requires access. Regular reviews are necessary to ensure this requirement is met. Source: HIPAA ยง 164.308(a)(4) & 164.312(a)(1) |
| CCPA | Covered entities must implement reasonable security procedures to protect personal information. This includes reviewing user accounts for appropriate access. Source: California Civil Code Section 1798.81.5 |
| GLBA | GLBA requires financial institutions to protect against unauthorized access to customer records. This requires regular access reviews. Source: GLBA Section 501(b) |
| SOX | Sarbanes-Oxley requires companies to maintain effective internal controls, which includes access control to limit access to financial records. Source: SOX Act Section 404 |
| NIS2 | Important entities operating in the EU must protect their information systems through access control and audits. Source: NIS2 Article 21 2. (i) |
| NIST 800-53 | Businesses working with Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) must implement access controls and regularly review user accounts for compliance. Source: NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5, AC-2 (j) |
| ISO 27001 | To achieve ISO 27001 certification, organizations must manage access rights in accordance with the principle of least privilege, which includes recurring audits. Source: ISO/IEC 27001:2022, Annex A 5.15 |
| SOC2 | As part of SOC2 compliance, organizations must have processes to assign and revoke access authorizations, which must include regular reviews. Source: SOC 2 CC6.3 |
Access Governance Best Practices for Microsoft Environments
Everything you need to know about implementing access control best practices in Active Directory, from implementation tips to common mistakes.
Importance of Access Certification
A well-functioning process for access certification benefits organizations in many ways, ranging from reduced administrative overhead to lower risk of data security incidents and a clear audit trail supporting compliance efforts.
Streamlined governance: Attempts to manually review access rights are highly inefficient, forcing admins to inventory user privileges through scripts or spreadsheets. Certification streamlines this process and saves valuable time.
Reduced risk: By reviewing authorizations and eliminating outdated access, organizations can decrease the risk of both internal misuse and outside attacks. The less access rights each user has, the less damage they can do.
Regulatory compliance: From SOX to NIST and the GDPR, many regulations require organizations to regularly review accounts for compliance with their access control demands. Access certification is a must-have in order to become and stay compliant with these standards.
Audit readiness: Detailed and up-to-date records are essential to demonstrating your compliance during external audits. Access certification provides a complete paper trail that makes it easy to prepare for check-ups.
Risks Without Access Certification
Without access certification, entities face the risk of users accumulating more and more unnecessary privileges over time. This process is known as privilege creep or privilege sprawl. It occurs because users receive new privileges when their role changes, but old access rights are never removed.
So how does privilege creep manifest in practice? Let’s look at three examples of the types of outdated access organizations risk when they do not certify user access.
Stale accounts: Stale accounts are left behind when a team member no longer needs to log in to a specific application โ either because they have left the org or have been moved to a different role or project. These inactive accounts are typically unmonitored and increase the attack surface of your organization. Each account is a potential entry point for an attacker.
Overprivileged users: Without certification, permissions build up over time, giving users access to sensitive information far beyond what is necessary for their role. This invites data theft and misuse. It also increases the damage attackers can cause if an overprivileged account falls into their hands.
Guest access: Problems with IT access go beyond your own staff. For organizations working with freelancers, contractors or service providers, it is critical to regularly check guest access to your network. Far too often guest access remains active even when a business relationship has ended.
Challenges in Performing Access Certification
When implementing an access certification process, businesses can face many roadblocks on both a technical and organizational level. Some of the most common challenges when certifying access include:
SaaS sprawl: Modern IT environments comprise dozens of applications, meaning your users hold privileges across any number of cloud and on-prem services. Keeping track of privileges despite this wide range of different apps is no easy task.
Time commitment: Unless you invest in automation to speed things up, the prospect of reviewing hundreds of unique permissions is incredibly time-consuming. This obviously impacts productivity, but it can also affect morale in your team.
Reviewer confidence: Sometimes, the person you task with reviewing privileges may not know if a user still needs access or not. This is especially common when certification is handled by someone who does not share the role in question, such as your IT department. To improve accuracy, keep decisions about access as close to the source as possible.
Stakeholder buy-in: When you first introduce access certification, reviewers may be hesitant about the idea of fitting yet another task into their schedule. To ensure their buy-in, it’s important to educate them about the risks your organization faces and the security advantages of auditing access.
Benefits of Implementing IGA for Access Certification
As you can see, access certification is a necessary safeguard to ensure that access privileges in your organization remain up-to-date and appropriate, minimizing the risk of data theft or cyberattacks. Despite the essential role that access certification plays in cybersecurity, auditing permissions by hand is a complex and time-consuming process that many organizations struggle with.
Fortunately, there are platforms for identity governance & administration purpose-built to take this work off your hands and streamline access certifications. There are many advantages to using an IGA solution when reviewing access, such as:
Automation: While it’s up to reviewers to decide whether access is still necessary, many of the surrounding tasks that leading up to certification can be automated. This includes collecting access information, notifying reviewers, creating audit checklists, documenting results and even implementing changes.
Single pane of glass: Even when access rights are split across many different applications, an IGA solution provides a centralized hub that allows you to audit all privileges through a single app.
User-friendly experience: A modern interface with clear instructions and actionable checklists makes the certification process easy to complete even for reviewers who are less than tech-savvy.
Immediate enforcement: With an IGA solution, you don’t need to worry about review outcomes getting lost in the shuffle. As soon as the audit is complete, the platform adjusts user access accordingly.
Complete audit trail: Forget the paperwork of tracking who approved what and when. Automated tools do all that work for you, documenting every step of the certification process โ whether access was renewed or revoked.
In-depth reporting: Need a snapshot of current access privileges to show your auditor? IGA makes it easy to get an overview of existing permissions and generate reports whenever you need them.
Self-service requests: To help you document when and how a user received access, governance platforms offer self-service access requests to streamline the approval workflow.
Role-based permissions: Ensure appropriate access at every stage of the user lifecycle with role-based access control. Not only does RBAC allow you to automate on- and offboarding, it also reduces the scope of access certification to only those permissions granted on top of users’ normal role.
tenfold: Access Certification with Faster Time to Value
Many governance solutions offer access certification as part of their platform, and which tool you choose has a large impact on how quickly you can set up your audit process and how easy audits are to complete for data owners in non-tech roles.
The biggest choice you face here is between Legacy IGA products vs. modern, streamlined solutions. Don’t let these complex behemoths fool you: They may boast an impressive set of features on paper, but the need for custom scripting turns setup into an endless boondoggle.
Thanks to its no-code configuration and out-of-the-box support for widely used apps, tenfold can be set up in a fraction of the time it takes to deploy legacy platforms. This means tenfold delivers on the security and compliance benefits of access certification much faster than comparable products.