Managing access to cloud and SaaS applications is essential for securing critical business operations. Access reviews are a vital component of this process. They ensure employees have the appropriate permissions to do their jobs without exposing your organization to unnecessary risks.
And, now it’s equally important to be able to conduct access reviews for your non-human identities (NHIs). These include API keys, OAuth tokens, service accounts, service principals, and cryptographic keys.
However, conducting manual access reviews often introduces more challenges than they solve, such as inefficient use of overstretched employees, while access misconfigurations and policy violations go unseen.
In this article, we break down why access reviews are crucial and what the common challenges are. We’ll share how Rezonate’s automated approach streamlines the process for all human and NHIs across your cloud, SaaS, and IdP tech stack.
Why User Access Reviews Are Essential
Mid-market and small enterprises can significantly benefit from conducting user access reviews for the following reasons:
- Security Risks and Breach Prevention: If compromised, attackers can exploit your user and non-human accounts. Regular reviews help identify and mitigate unauthorized access or over-privileged identities, reducing the risk of breaches.
- Prevent Access Creep: Over time, users and machines may accumulate excessive permissions. This leads to access beyond what’s necessary for their current roles. Regular reviews ensure users have only the access they need, reducing security risks.
- Mitigate Insider Threats: Unauthorized or excessive access increases the risk of insider threats. By conducting access reviews, organizations can identify and remediate potential risks from users with unnecessary privileges.
- Minimize Attack Surface: Reducing the number of users and machines with elevated privileges decreases the attack surface, making it harder for attackers to exploit compromised accounts to gain access to critical systems.
- Detect Misconfigurations: Reviews help detect and correct misconfigurations or inappropriate permissions that could lead to unintended data exposure or unauthorized access to sensitive resources.
- Compliance and Regulatory Requirements: Many regulations and standards, such as NIST CSF 2.0, ISO 27001, SOX 404, HIPAA, GDPR, and SOC 2, require organizations to periodically review user access to sensitive data and systems to ensure compliance.
- Control Licensing Costs: Mismanaged user access can lead to unnecessary costs, especially in SaaS environments where licenses are often tied to user accounts. Regular reviews help identify and deactivate inactive or unnecessary accounts.
- Support Effective User Lifecycle Management: Access reviews help manage user and machine accounts throughout their lifecycle. They ensure proper onboarding and offboarding processes, which is crucial in dynamic cloud and SaaS environments.
User access reviews are more than just good governance—they are often required by industry regulations and compliance frameworks.
Conducting access reviews regularly makes them time-consuming and potentially pulls teams away from core responsibilities.
Challenges in Conducting Manual User Access Reviews
Manual access reviews introduce several challenges for organizations, including:
- Delay in Detection of Policy Violations: When access reviews are not conducted regularly or are done manually, policy violations may persist unnoticed, potentially leading to breaches.
- Human Error: Manual review and approval processes are prone to mistakes, such as misinterpreting access permissions or overlooking policy violations, increasing security and compliance risks.
- Inefficient Resource Utilization: Time-consuming manual reviews drain resources that could be better spent on higher-value tasks like threat detection and incident response.
- Working Across Silos: Trying to get reviewers, business owners, IT, security and compliance teams on the same page and having access to the information they need to know when they need to know it can be a very challenging endeavor. It takes time from everyone and doesn’t always result in desired results. This can lead to certification fatigue and a lack of future participation and engagement.
- Rubber Stamping: Moreover, many reviewers—often managers or department heads—don’t fully understand what they’re approving during these reviews. Without the necessary context or insights, this can lead to rubber-stamping decisions that bypass the true purpose of the review process, increasing security risks.
Automation Streamlines and Improves Access Reviews
Manual access reviews can’t keep up with the constant changes in dynamic cloud-forward environments. That’s where Rezonate steps in, offering an automated and comprehensive solution to simplify and enhance your user access reviews.
Unified Visibility
Rezonate delivers real-time visibility into all access privileges, entitlements, and group memberships across your entire environment. This includes human and non-human identities, spanning cloud apps, SaaS platforms, and identity providers. With unified visibility, you can easily review access across multiple systems to spot access issues or anomalies before they escalate, ensuring you always know who has access to what.
Contextual Insights for Reviewers
Instead of blindly approving access, Rezonate equips reviewers with actionable insights and recommendations. This context-driven approach allows reviewers to make informed decisions based on the user’s role, access, and associated risks, reducing the likelihood of rubber-stamping and improving overall security.
Risk-Based Prioritization
Rezonate helps you focus on the most critical areas first. By prioritizing access reviews based on risk—whether related to apps, resources, or policy violations—you can address the highest threats to your organization before they become a problem.
Automated User Access Review Campaigns
Stay on top of your access reviews without the manual overhead. Rezonate’s automated review campaigns run continuously, ensuring your organization complies with security standards and regulatory requirements. You can set it and forget it, knowing that access reviews are always up to date.
One-Click Remediations
When risks or misconfigurations are identified, Rezonate allows for one-click remediations directly from the review interface. This feature ensures that any unnecessary access or policy violations are addressed instantly, helping you maintain a secure environment without delays.
Compliance Alignment
Rezonate ensures your access reviews meet specific compliance mandates and industry standards. By helping you identify compliance gaps or policy violations easily, you can improve audit performance, reducing the risk of fines or breaches.
With Rezonate’s automation and intelligent insights, your access reviews become more efficient, accurate, and aligned with your security and compliance goals.
Accelerate Access Reviews
Automating and accelerating the access review process eliminates the guesswork and manual effort that often plague security and compliance teams. Rezonate can help you streamline reviews, reduce human error, and provide actionable insights that help you protect your cloud and SaaS environments more effectively and efficiently.
Are you ready to turn access reviews from a time-consuming task into a seamless, automated process that strengthens your security posture while freeing your team to focus on more strategic priorities? Request a demo and see how we can help you transform your access review process today.
