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The management of user access has long been an extraordinarily complex challenge for organizations. Central to this challenge is the concept of creating defined user roles. Used correctly, roles provide a means of simplification, and allow organizations to tailor enterprise access to the needs of the business. The result, in a perfect world, is greater IT operational efficiency, business agility and improved security through a set of preventative controls.
In practice, nearly every organization has struggled with how to define and implement access roles that will meet the objectives of the business. Because of this, the promise of IT administrative operational efficiency and improved security has remained out of reach. To move beyond the broken processes and inefficiencies of today, organizations will need to invest in a continuous and automated process of role-based access governance. Critical to driving returns in this area is solving the “language gap” problem that many corporations face.
Business stakeholders do not speak the language of technical roles and entitlements, and as such lack the ability to meaningfully communicate with IT stakeholders to properly request and govern access. This paper describes the steps required to implement such a process, and organizations that adopt roles based access governance will be rewarded with simplified processes that lessen organizational burden, improve IT operational efficiency, reduce overall risk and enable sustainable, audible compliance.