Enforce Governance and meet Compliance for a zero-trust, least-privilege security posture
Modern security programs no longer treat least privilege as a “best practice”, it is now a baseline expectation. As organizations adopt Joiner-Mover-Leaver (JML) automation to scale identity operations, a critical challenge emerges: automation alone does not guarantee secure or compliant outcomes.
In fact, 72% of organizations experience delayed detection of security issues due to misalignment between IT, Security, Risk, and Compliance teams. To maintain a zero-trust, least-privilege security posture, organizations must continuously validate how identity automation operates through identity governance and compliance, supported by observability, reporting, and analytics.
This blog explores how governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) controls can be applied on top of Identity Lifecycle Automation to validate controls, reduce perceived risk, and produce measurable proof without adding operational complexity.
Organizations typically start their identity journey by automating their joiner, mover and leaver processes using a singular authoritative source of truth, provisioning user identities and entitlements to the user’s role based on RBAC (Role-Based Access Control) and ABAC (Attribute-Based Access Control) and aligning the access control hierarchy with the actual need to know of the organization.
Imposing strict access restrictions on users’ privileges is just one of the steps available to organizations in mitigating manual involvement with JML administration. Implementing identity governance and compliance ensures that HR resources and IT costs are optimized while maintaining proper control. Organizations have reported that implementing self-service no-code automation has resulted in reductions in JML administrative effort of 90% or more and cost avoidance of up to 60%. However, an important question remains after the implementation of self-service no-code automation: how do you know if it is functioning properly and consistently? Identity governance and compliance will answer the above question.
Organizations will continue to experience governance-related challenges with automated identities unless HR, IT, Security, and Compliance operate in unison. According to PwC, 45% of CISOs report that the existence of governance silos remains a key barrier to effective security. In the absence of clarity between JML automation, identity management, and corporate security, gaps in the identity lifecycle will emerge.
Establishing strong identity governance and compliance both reduces the risk and magnitude of a security breach.
According to a finding, good governance significantly decreases the cost of breach remediation, by as high as 50%, as a direct result of good governance. While implementations of governance mechanisms do not guarantee that breaches will never occur, they are a vital part of reducing risk exposure and supporting a zero-trust security model.
Observability is the foundation of identity governance and compliance. The observability of all joiner, mover, and leaver events processed is captured and includes activity details related to that joiner, mover, or leaver event and all full change data capture (CDC). This CDC includes the data received from HR systems and how the data was transformed into an identity profile including the old and new values of each attribute, and any new entitlements that were granted, removed, or retained. Additionally, JML automation allows organizations to capture the event that triggered the CDC and the changes made.
Capture of both the event that triggered the impression and the changes made allows the organization to have insight into what happened, when it happened, and why it happened. Scheduled reports can be created to verify proper operation of JML automation. These scheduled reports assist in validating that the JML automation has allowed for timely onboarding of employees, assigning the correct role-based access controls, and completely deprovisioning employees who have terminated from the organization.
Not every human resource (HR) event generates an update to a person’s identity or credentials. As part of good governance, organizations must have insight into how different types of HR events can create an updated identity (e.g., new employee) or create a new credential (e.g., new hired staff). The process of reconciling HR events with updated identities and credentials provides visibility into how many of the different types of events that came from HR Systems will result in an updated identity, and which will not.
The visibility provided through reconciling HR events will ensure that HR/IT workflows are working as intended. In addition, it will provide the opportunity for organizations to validate any processes that may have been automated, validate that they will produce the expected outcome and provide a path to identifying gaps in configuration and/or process through manual investigation of the events.
Once HR Systems are connected to a third-party system via an API, HR Events can be exported as observability and/or change data to an external endpoint such as an object storage service, a database, and/or a Security Information/Management System (SIEM). This will provide organizations with the opportunity to either develop custom analytics or utilize the identity data as part of a broader security monitoring workflow.
For those organizations that do not want to expend additional resources towards developing a Business Intelligence (BI) structure, consolidating the identity and entitlement data into a managed analytics solution will allow for lower operational costs, while still permitting the development of reporting, analytics and the ability to conduct audits.
The identity-centric view of an employee includes a complete list of all employees, along with advanced filtering capabilities, based on HR Attributes, Identity Attributes, and Entitlements. The identity-centric view also shows all changes to the HR data, identity profile, and entitlement of each employee in the employee’s employment lifecycle. This historical information supports audits and compliance review processes.
In contrast, the entitlement-centric view of the employee focuses on the knowledge and understanding of the employee’s access, or entitlements, to systems or other privileges within the organization. The entitlement-centric view provides access information for each employee, including when and why access was granted.
With identity governance and compliance, reporting is critical. Built-in reporting libraries provide reports for common audit requirements based on multiple standards (SOC 2, HIPAA, ISO 27001, NIST, and SOX).
The following are examples of typical reports:
Each report shows how identity-related processes are documented and how they work overtime.
With an increasingly strong foundation of trusted identity data, Governance can now move away from a static entity but can now provide dynamic and flexible means of governance using machine learning.
Machine learning capabilities that are currently planned will include:
Peer-based machine learning recommendations will examine the access of similar roles (i.e., peers), and the machine learning algorithms will provide appropriate or recommended entitlements to maintain the least privileged access. Continuous evaluation of access will ensure that entitlements continue to align and are valid over time, as opposed to relying solely on periodic review.
Traditional access certification cycles occur every 3-months or annually, thus leaving a gap for risks that may not be identified at that time. Continuous access certification allows for proactive enrolment to be performed as exceptions are identified or patterns identified.
Role mining enhancements will further support the simplified access-control model by identifying prevalent access patterns within existing identity data and transforming these patterns into actionable access-control rules. The result is reduced dependency on tribal knowledge and the need for users to manually define rules.
Identity Governance and Compliance is crucial to implementing a zero trust security framework and achieving the goal of Least Privilege Access across the entire organization. By leveraging the power of Joiner-Mover-Leaver Automation and enhancing this model with Observability, Reporting, Analytics and Governance Controls, Companies can ensure their Identity Workflows are functioning as intended.
The integration of an Organization’s Long Term Identity Data, Compliance Reporting, and future Machine Learning-Driven Insight transforms Identity Governance and Compliance from a periodic activity to a continuous, measurable process to reduce Risk and adhere to Regulatory Compliance.
Workforce 360 is considered an add-on to Hire2Retire core product. Core Hire2Retire provides Identity Lifecycle Management, Provisioning, Observability and Reporting, whereas Workforce 360 adds additional capabilities such as Long-term Data Retention and Analytics and Insight features.
Yes, there is retention of Identity Data after an account has been deleted; the data will still indicate as such.
Yes, both ABAC and RBAC are fully supported and can be combined to allow for an organization to utilize either model as they fit.
Yes, Governance Analytics will work with all current Identities and Entitlements based on the data available in the current Identity and Access System.
This solution is intended for mid-market organizations with an employee size of 200 to 3,000.
