User Access Review (UAR)
What is a User Access Review (UAR)?
A User Access Review (UAR) entails identifying, assessing, and managing the access rights of users within an IT system. UARs are a critical component in identity governance. Organizations conduct user access reviews by reviewing all user access permissions, ensuring users are provisioned only with the appropriate rights necessary for their role. Ideally, the user access review process is completely automated.
Some goals and drivers of user access reviews include maintaining a least privilege security posture, reducing the identity attack surface to minimize risks, and addressing compliance and cyber insurance initiatives.
Read on to better understand:
What user access reviews are, and why they are needed
Important UAR use cases
User access review best practices
Common UAR challenges and solutions
Why are User Access Reviews Important?
User access reviews are important because they help organizations reduce their identity attack surface. In the typical enterprise, employees come and go, and their responsibilities evolve or change more drastically—such as with role change. When left unchecked, these users' permissions and roles remain the same. As a result, existing employees' entitlements continue to expand over time, an issue called privilege creep. These overprivileged accounts can broaden the attack surface and pose a threat to the organization.
Other cybersecurity issues can arise if an employee leaves and user access reviews are not conducted, or the findings of such reviews are not addressed. In some instances, these former employees leave behind orphaned accounts. By continuing to retain access rights when they are no longer needed, these individuals' accounts become a far more significant threat to the organization. Such accounts could serve as a backdoor for a threat actor to gain access into the environment.
User access reviews help ensure right-sizing of access permissions and adherence to the principle of least privilege (PoLP)—a key pillar of identity security and a common regulatory requirement. Least privilege ensures users have only the level of access and rights required to perform their jobs by role, at any given moment. Additionally, user access reviews minimize the attack surface by removing potential privilege escalation pathways that could be exploited via lateral movement.
Who Needs to Conduct User Access Reviews?
All organizations using digital platforms to manage sensitive data should conduct user access reviews. They should especially consider implementing UARs for the following purposes:
Safeguarding Data and Meeting Privacy Regulations
Privacy regulations often require organizations to put strict parameters around how they manage sensitive data and who has access to it. This includes country-specific regulations, like CCPA in the United States, and GDPR in the European Union. It also includes industry-specific regulations, like SOX, and voluntary frameworks such as ISO 27001 and SOC 2. As an example of these privacy regulations, we can take a closer look at HIPAA. This widespread regulation applies to all healthcare entities in the United States. HIPAA requires the following controls for protecting electronic protected health information (e-PHI):
Access controls: maintaining policies and procedures that only allow authorized users to access e-PHI
Audit controls: recording and auditing access controls and activities around e-PHI
User access reviews can help businesses meet both the above requirements, along with many others included in other country- or industry-specific regulations.
Maintaining Least Privilege in Cloud Infrastructure and SaaS
Organizations that leverage cloud infrastructure and software-as-a-service (SaaS) should prioritize user access reviews. Cloud environments lead to a less defined perimeter, blurring the line between privileged and non-privileged access. It’s important to keep cloud user access and permissions in check. User access reviews help ensure each identity only possesses the minimum level of access needed to perform authorized activities.
Specialized technologies like Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) can help you conduct user access reviews within complex cloud environments. CIEM solutions provide multi-cloud visibility over permissions and entitlements, enabling organizations to ensure access is right-sized.
3 User Access Review (UAR) Best Practices
When conducting a user access review, your team should keep the following best practices in mind:
Cover the breadth and depth of all access entitlements across your organization: This includes permissions, roles, and privileges granted to individuals by role or by exception. Examine these various levels of access entitlement in relation to access policies around sensitive data, applications, and system resources. These sensitive assets exist across the organization—on-premises, in the cloud, or within licensed SaaS, IaaS, or PaaS solutions.
Conduct user access reviews on a regular basis: Conduct user access reviews at frequent and predefined intervals. A regular cadence of user access reviews helps to continuously right-size access and prevent, or mitigate, privilege creep. The practice of routine reviews makes it easier to comply with regulatory requirements, while also mitigating unauthorized access and other threats.
Engage key stakeholders: It can be challenging to figure out which access rights an employee needs to do their job. Or, alternatively, which rights can be revoked without causing operational disruptions. This is why it’s important to obtain managerial approval for the access rights assigned to employees and, in particular, subordinates. By involving the right stakeholders, you can ensure access aligns with job roles, individual responsibilities, and established organizational policies.
Common Challenges in the User Access Review Process
While conducting user access reviews is a well-recognized identity governance best practice, many organizations find the process difficult to implement. Largely, these challenges arise due to a lack of the proper tools to automate UARs. With that said, a few common roadblocks for conducting user access reviews include:
Overwhelming time and resource investment: To right-size access, teams must gain an understanding of each team's access requirements. Then, they must go into each individual application or system to revoke unneeded access. Absent automation, these steps make for a lengthy review process that drains valuable time and resources.
Lack of visibility into the entire identity attack surface: To conduct user access reviews, these teams must understand where sensitive assets reside and how identities are gaining access to them. However, it can be challenging for teams to gain a big-picture perspective of all access rights and potential escalation paths throughout the organization—on-premises, in the cloud, and within SaaS applications.
Difficulty in proving compliance: Many teams find themselves manually building a paper trail for compliance audits. They end up wasting valuable time taking screenshots and entering data into spreadsheets.
Convoluted review cycles: Roles like managerial staff and resource owners must get involved in the user access review process. As a result, multiple stakeholders must align on any decisions, such as access revocation.
Ongoing maintenance: After right-sizing access, many businesses find it difficult to upkeep the principle of least privilege across the whole organization. They often end up with a backlog of access request support tickets that will inhibit operational efficiency, if not promptly addressed.
Solution Capabilities that Support User Access Reviews
Organizations can turn to specialized identity governance and access (IGA) solutions to improve their approach to user access reviews. When looking for solutions that will streamline user access reviews, prioritize options with the following capabilities:
Centralization of all entitlements: It can be challenging to identify and understand all access permissions. Teams must understand each entitlement and its historical context, such as who authorized it, when, and why. Look for a solution that automatically compiles this information, so you don’t need to manually track it down.
Compatibility with common frameworks: The solution should enable the capability to align your access controls with common compliance frameworks such as SOX, ISO 27001, and SOC2. Tools like preset templates can help your team more effectively align with compliance frameworks.
Automated evidence collection: Manual creation of an audit trail via ticketing and spreadsheets drains valuable time and resources. Instead, look for a solution that automates the compilation of audit-ready evidence.
Instant cleanup for unneeded access: Your solution should give your team the ability to maintain, flag, or remove user access from a centralized location, eliminating the need to visit each individual app directly to make changes.
Streamlined collaboration: The solution should also include features for streamlining collaboration, such as auto-reminders to reviewers via existing channels.
Dynamic access right-sizing: It’s also essential for IGA solutions to include features for reinforcing least privilege between user access reviews. Otherwise, the everyday operations within your organization will naturally cause privilege creep between reviews.
Compatibility with other identity security solutions: Your UAR solution should work seamlessly with other identity security capabilities, such as PAM and ITDR, to ensure access is right-sized and access-related risks are reduced as much as possible. CIEM compatibility is also important for maintaining least privilege across dynamic cloud environments.
Start automating your user access reviews with BeyondTrust. Contact us to learn more.
