Security leaders can enhance security at their enterprises by conducting frequent and thorough user access reviews. A user access review is a control designed to verify that only the appropriate users (generally employees) have access to organizational resources such as applications or infrastructure. The review is intended to determine whether any users who are no longer with the enterprise or have transferred to another team in the organization still have access to applications or infrastructure that are no longer relevant to their role. If that is the case, access should be removed accordingly to avoid exploitation that can result in reputational, financial or data loss.
Enterprise risk can be mitigated by understanding user types and risk scenarios and following some best practices for user access reviews that allow full transparency and deter unauthorized users.
User Types
A user is a person who uses an application or tool to achieve a desired business outcome. In the IT world, users can be classified into two broad groups:
- Business users—They use an application or tool as part of achieving their defined business outcome. Some examples are finance application users who use an application for enterprise finance activity and product development application users who use an application for a product development process.
- IT users—They have access to an application, tool or system for their assigned application delivery responsibilities, such as application development, testing, deployment or operations support. This user type is usually given access based on IT team type, such as development, support or general.
Common User Access Risk Scenarios
The following are some common user access risk scenarios that result in users who can access applications or systems to which they should not have access:
- Users leave a team but still have one or more of their previous team access privileges.
- Users change roles but still have one or more of their previous role access privileges.
- Users leave the enterprise but still have one or more access privileges.
- A user’s reporting manager is involved in approving user continued access attestation. The risk occurs when a current reporting manager moves to a different team/assignment, but the extract used for attestation communication is not appropriately changed and such communication is sent to the user’s previous reporting manager.
User Access Review Best Practices
Implementing user access review best practices can help to eliminate or avoid risk scenarios.
Business User Access Review Best Practices
The application business owner is responsible for the effectiveness of the user access review control for business users. The owner can assign a delegate to assist with this activity, but the application business owner remains accountable for this control and any violations.
Best practices that application business owners can implement to help ensure effective user access reviews include:
- When a new business user joins the team, the application business owner attests and provides relevant roles and access levels for the business user.
- When a business user leaves the team or changes roles, the application business owner validates the user and the user’s access level for any updates or removal.
- At predetermined intervals (prescheduled part of calendar of activity), a business user access review is automatically triggered or manually initiated. The application business owner receives a list of existing business users, roles and access privileges. The application business owner then takes action to remove or change any incorrect privileges.
- Any change to the application business owner and/or delegate is to be updated as part of transition from current contact to new contact.
IT User Access Review Best Practices
IT users need to have access to the application back-end to execute their responsibilities. IT users’ access privileges are dependent on their team and role.
The application’s IT owner is responsible for the effectiveness of the user access review control for IT users. The owner can assign a delegate to assist with this activity, but the application’s IT owner remains accountable for this control and any violations. The IT owner is the custodian of the business data. Therefore, after the IT owner completes the access review, he or she must get approval from the application business owner to complete the user access review cycle.
If the application business owner is not an IT expert, the application IT owner can set up a clarification session with the business owner to explain the application and the IT responsibilities. This effort can increase trust between the business team and the IT team and result in a more productive workplace, as improved trust enhances speed and reduces cost.
Best practices that an application’s IT owners can implement to help ensure effective user access reviews include:
- Developing an onboarding template (figure 1) that provides the user roles, the tasks for each role and the required access for each task. The onboarding template role responsibilities are based on the segregation of duties (SoD) control (figure 2). The SoD assigns responsibilities and privileges for IT team members so that no single person can introduce fraudulent or malicious code without detection. No user can have access that can potentially compromise the control. For example, for change management, a developer produces code and performs unit testing. A lead then verifies the code and test results and moves the code to a higher environment. The developer cannot move the code to a higher environment, and the lead does not have the ability to develop code.
- Making it mandatory to use an onboarding document when providing access privileges to a user
- Using a calendar of activity (figure 3) to mark and initiate periodic user access reviews as part of the enterprise audit and assurance program. Determine the frequency of user access reviews based on the criticality of the asset, the associated risk and user movement dynamics.
Implementing user access review best practices can help to eliminate or avoid the mentioned risk scenarios.
Conclusion
Access privileges are dependent on an employee’s team and role, meaning that they are subject to change at any time and must be continuously monitored. Enterprise security leaders must challenge themselves to conduct better user access reviews with the help of automation tools and techniques. Ensuring that the only users to access a system are those who are authorized to do so will better secure the organization and provide assurance to customers that their data are not at risk.
Editor’s Note
This article is excerpted from an article that appeared in the ISACA® Journal. Read Sundaresan Ramaseshan’s full article, “Effective User Access Reviews,” in vol. 4, 2019, of the ISACA Journal.
Sundaresan Ramaseshan, CISM, ITIL Foundation, ITIL Service Operation
Is an IT supervisor supporting security tools at Ford Motor Private Ltd. in Chennai, India. He has more than 27 years of experience in various IT software development life cycle roles. Ramaseshan continues to enhance his depth of knowledge in the security domain and share some of the successes he observes in day-to-day operations in the hopes that they may benefit the IT security community.