ACCESS GOVERNANCE – The Phrase to go by to achieve Continuous Compliance

Access governance is a security solution that has been gaining attention across enterprises globally for better visibility and vigilance of user access into business applications and associated infrastructure components. With expanding organizational boundaries as enterprises grow in size and complexity by the day, it has become imperative for them to keep a close check on who has access to what, when and how? Access Certification is what precisely keeps track of who has access to applications, databases, data centers, passwords and internal networks and speculates them in terms of relevance at multiple levels through a vantage point.

The ultimate goal of access governance systems is to give you such a view and control that it becomes extremely reliable and relatively easy to manage. When an enterprise pulls together information such as who has accounts on what systems, when those accounts were last used, what the accounts enabled the account holders to do, and who has responsibility for approving the access provided, it will have a powerful platform to spot vulnerable accounts, cases of excessive access and also determine what to do to resolve these issues. In short provide complete intelligence and insights into users and their access.

An access governance solution will let you speculate your internal security from various perspectives. The Access Audits feature is crucially important to IT governance in general and to regulatory compliance in particular. You can monitor access changes on systems or applications. It can look at employees individually and review their access to a number of resources. You could also schedule periodic access reviews and then track them for closure. In some cases, you can automate access requests and access revokes, making sure that access review recommendations are remediated in target resources.

There are various problems access governance would help the enterprise resolve. It looks into the relevance of access when individuals change responsibilities. It spots stale accounts to locate them after their owners quit the organization. It taps orphans, which involves speculating the accounts that are obsolete and don’t belong to anyone.

Access governance systems can be of supreme importance at the time of security audits. This is because they can provide reliable evidence that accesses were reviewed and problems were addressed. While deploying an access governance system two things to be kept in mind are Coverage and Maturity. Coverage denotes the scope of users and organization’s all sensitive applications that need to be brought into purview. Maturity levels could be in terms of implementing Identity Audits, Access Certifications, Automated Provisioning, Access Controls, Compliance Reporting and Self Service Access Requests.

Organizations that need to reduce access related risk right now, and cannot afford to wait for an automated provisioning should consider adopting Access Governance Solution. It is to be kept in mind that the more complex an organization gets, the harder it is to take control of the bigger picture. The goal of access governance systems is to give you that intelligence and insights in a way that it becomes relatively easier to manage internal security concerns and achieve comprehensive compliance.