Security & Compliance
• 15 min read
Entitlement Management: A Comprehensive Guide
9th June, 2023
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In the ever-evolving world of access permissions/controls, one term that stands out is entitlement Management. Entitlement management is crucial to ensure the user access permissions are adequately managed in order to maintain a secure access environment.
But managing the user entitlements can be a task for IT teams due to frequent changes in the user's roles and requirements and the large SaaS stack. However, one can mitigate this challenge through automation and streamline entitlement management even in complex setups with multiple changes.
Before we proceed forward and understand how entitlement management works, its importance, and more, let's start with the basics and learn about what exactly entitlement management is and where the need came from.
What Is Entitlement Management?
Basically, entitlement management is a subset of identity governance that enables IT teams to manage the identity and access lifecycle at scale by automating access assignments, reviews, access request workflows, and expiration.
We know that in an organization, employees require access to various SaaS apps, data, groups, etc to perform their tasks effectively. But managing this access can be a challenging task for IT teams due to frequent requirement changes; for instance, an existing employee gets promoted and requires access to new SaaS apps and data or needs changes in their access rights (first, he might have user rights now he requires admin rights).
However, that's not it; this situation gets more complicated when you collaborate with external organizations. That’s because your IT team may not know what kind of access to what resources users from other or external organizations would require. Not just that, the same might happen vice-versa as well, i.e., other organizations being unaware of the types of applications, groups, or sites that you or your IT team uses.
So what entitlement management does is it helps your IT team overcome these challenges. It assists your IT team in effectively managing access to groups, SaaS apps, or sites and for users outside your company who require access to those resources.
Why The Need For Entitlement Management Occurred?
In large organizations, IT teams often struggle to manage employee access to various SaaS apps and data. Also, employee(s)/ user(s) might find it challenging to determine which level of access they require, and even if they do, they get stuck in the endless loop of whom to ask for access approval. Moreover, once employee(s)/user(s) gain access to apps and data, they tend to retain it longer than necessary.
These challenges become more complex when external organization users, such as supply chain partners or business associates, require access. Inviting users from other organizations and managing their access consistently poses unique difficulties.
This is where entitlement management emerges as a solution to address these issues.
It ensures that employees receive the appropriate level of access based on their job role and responsibilities on day one and minimizes the chance of over-provisioning or granting unnecessary access.
Further, when employees require access to new apps to fulfill specific tasks or due to changes in their role, they can easily request the app access they need through an automated workflow. This eliminates confusion and the endless loop of determining whom to ask for approval.
Also, this solution automates the access approval process, ensuring that requests are routed to the right individuals or teams for quick and accurate decisions.
Additionally, entitlement management helps your IT team enforce access policies by setting automatic access expiration and periodic access review. By doing so, your IT team can ensure access rights are regularly reviewed and revoked when no longer required, reducing the risk of unnecessary access retention.
It provides your team with a centralized view of user access rights across various SaaS apps and data to keep track of the entire process.
Further, this solution generates reports based on the above data and helps you prepare for upcoming audits; it also enables your IT team to safeguard crucial SaaS app data by promptly mitigating security and compliance risks.
You must be wondering what the consequences will be if your IT team does not manage entitlement appropriately. To clarify your doubt, here's a quick overview of it.
Consequences Of Ineffective Entitlement Management
Regularly reviewing permissions and access rights granted to users is important to maintain a strong cybersecurity posture for organizations. As companies evolve and adapt to new technologies and business requirements, their digital landscape expands, potentially leading to unintended and excessive access for users. This growth can create an environment where the risk of cyber-attacks increases significantly.
One of the critical challenges IT teams encounter is the accumulation of permissions over time. Users may be granted access to different data, SaaS apps, services, and systems as they perform their roles and responsibilities. Often, these permissions are controlled manually through groups, where users are added based on their roles. However, as users gain tenure within an organization, they may be added to multiple groups, leading to a phenomenon known as "permission creep."
Permission creep refers to the gradual accumulation of access rights beyond what is necessary for an individual's job function. Over time, this can lead to users having more access than they need, making them potential targets for cyber attackers or creating opportunities for insider threats. Additionally, these accumulated permissions might go unnoticed by IT teams, further increasing the risk of unauthorized access.
Unstructured data, which includes files, documents, and other digital assets without a predefined data model, is particularly susceptible to the consequences of permission creep. It constitutes a significant portion of an organization's critical technology assets, estimated at around 80%. If not managed carefully, unstructured data can become a security liability, potentially exposing sensitive data to vulnerabilities.
To mitigate these risks, IT teams need to manage regular entitlement and conduct regular reviews efficiently. These reviews involve evaluating the permissions granted to users, identifying any unnecessary access, and taking appropriate actions to revoke or modify access rights accordingly. By conducting these reviews, your team can prevent unauthorized access, data breaches, and potential security incidents.
Apart from that, entitlement management is important for maintaining the principle of least privilege, which means users are only granted the minimum access necessary to perform their specific tasks.
Now that you have learned about the consequences, let's understand how effective entitlement management can bring change and why it's important to implement.
Why Is Entitlement Management Crucial?
Below are the reasons why an effective entitlement management solution is necessary:
With an entitlement management solution, your team can seamlessly manage user access to apps, groups, Teams, and SharePoint sites. Also, with time-limited assignments and recurring access reviews, it enables your team to ensure access remains relevant and secure.
It automates access provisioning based on user role, department, and designation, granting users access to the right resources on day one. And when the user role changes, access is automatically adjusted, keeping permissions up to date.
With this solution, your IT teams can set policies and rules for request approvals and access expiration, streamlining the access request process, meeting compliance requirements, and mitigating security risks.
Seamlessly connect with partner organizations, enabling their users to request access. When a user from an external directory is approved, they are automatically invited and granted access. If their access expires and no other assignments exist, their B2B account in your directory is automatically removed.
What Does An Effective Entitlement System Offer?
Entitlement management systems play a crucial role in maintaining security and access control. These systems offer the following key capabilities:
Define User Roles: An effective entitlement management system allows your IT admins to identify various user roles within the organization. Once they discover the user roles, it becomes easier for the IT team to grant the right access to the right user as per their role and responsibilities.
Manage Hierarchies of User Roles: In many organizations, user roles are organized hierarchically, with different levels of access and authority. The entitlement management system enables your team to manage these role hierarchies efficiently to ensure smooth access control through automation and data discovery methods.
Define and Manage Permissions: This system enables your IT team to set and manage permissions for each user role. Permissions define what actions users in a particular role can perform on different resources, such as viewing, editing, or deleting data.
Modify and Revoke User Privileges: with this system, your IT team can modify access rights based on user roles and permissions changes. Also, when a user no longer requires specific access permissions, the system will promptly revoke those access rights.
Handle Complex Access Conditions: In real-world scenarios, access control requirements can become quite complex, involving multiple conditions for granting or denying access to resources. An effective entitlement management system can handle such complexities by enabling your IT team to set and review access policies regularly. These systems do all these while ensuring security and compliance.
Implement Access Control Paradigms: Entitlement management systems utilize different access control paradigms, such as data-driven approaches and role-based access control. These paradigms define how access decisions are made based on specific rules and policies.
Monitor User Access Pattern & Behaviour: To assess whether user access aligns with their role, entitlement management systems keep a tab on user access patterns. This helps your IT team identify users with unauthorized access and secure SaaS app data from potential breaches.
Now that you're aware of the various benefits that entitlement management systems offer, you might be considering adopting such a solution for your needs. Among the numerous options available in the market, there's one exceptional solution that enables your IT team to work effectively and efficiently, and that is Zluri. What exactly is Zluri, and how does it work? To learn more about it, read on.
Seamlessly Manage User Entitlement With Zluri’s Modern Identity & Governance Solution
In the era where SaaS adoption is boosting and remote work has taken a full bloom, it’s becoming more challenging for IT teams to gain complete visibility into user access. They are struggling to identify which users possess what type of access permissions and to which all SaaS applications and data.
Also, often in a decentralized workspace, IT teams tend to give users more access than they actually require, and even at times when the user role changes, the IT team does not revoke the outdated permissions, creating security risks. And this concern is increasing alarmingly with the company's expansion.
However, there is a solution that will help your team address these challenges,i.e. Zluri. Zluri is a modern IGA platform that enables your IT team to ensure that user access aligns precisely with their roles and responsibilities throughout their tenure. With Zluri's remarkable capabilities, including access review, data discovery engine, automation engine, and more, your IT team can bid farewell to the worries of mismanaged user access due to inefficient user entitlement management.
So let’s look into its key capabilities one by one in detail to help you understand how Zluri works.
1. Seamlessly Discover Your User’s Data With Zluri’s Data Discovery Engine
We all are well aware of how time-consuming the manual identification process is, determining which user performs what roles, has access to all apps and data, what level of access permissions they have, and more. This manual process is not only inefficient but also prone to human errors, which can further compromise data security.
Well, Zluri understands the concern, and in order to address these challenges it has introduced five discovery methods, i.e., SSO or IDP, finance systems, direct integrations, browser extensions (optional), and desktop agents (optional). With the help of these methods, your IT team can gain complete visibility into user data, including user roles, what level of access permissions they have been assigned to which particular applications, their last active status, and more.
Furthermore, with such granular insights, your IT team can conduct access reviews effectively. Also, the process becomes streamlined, efficient, and less prone to oversight, ensuring that access privileges are aligned with user role and compliance requirements.
2. Automate Access Management & Ensure User Access Aligns With Their Roles With Zluri’s Automation Engine
Entitlement management is not a one-time task; it's a continuous process that starts from the moment an employee(s)/user(s) joins the organization and continues until their tenure comes to an end.
And Zluri understands the significance of managing entitlements at every stage of the user's lifecycle. So let’s see how Zluri seamlessly manages entitlements in different phases of the user journey, ensuring a secure and compliant access management process from day one till the very end.
Assigning Access Permissions As Per User Role Upon Onboarding
In order to precisely assign access as per user role, Zluri connects user profiles with their digital identity and transfers all their data from HRSM to its centralized dashboard. So that your IT team can easily cross-check and verify users' identity before assigning new employees access to any SaaS app or data.
Now your IT team no longer has to go back and forth or switch through multiple screens; Zluri brings all the employee-related info to a single location.
Furthermore, to streamline the access granting process, Zluri automates the entire provisioning process. With just a few clicks, your team can grant new employees access, ensuring they have the right permissions to necessary apps. This boosts productivity, allowing employees to start working from day one.
How does Zluri automate the process? Well, your IT team can create onboarding workflows. All they need to do is select users they want to grant access to or onboard and apps (you can even choose from recommended apps option), which all apps they want the users to access.
Then, your team can take necessary actions easily by clicking "add an action." Here, they can schedule the workflow and more.
Zluri even provides in-app suggestions, allowing your team to add employees to different channels, groups, or projects or send automated welcome messages.
The actions can vary for different applications and are mentioned under recommended actions. Once all the actions are set, you can directly run the workflow or save it as a playbook for future use.
For added efficiency, Zluri offers automated playbooks (i.e. collections of recommended applications for automation) that can be customized for different roles, departments, and designations. This feature streamlines the onboarding of new employees, making it as easy as a few clicks to set up their access.
Note- Apart from that, your team can set automation actions, such as by triggering if and but conditions, they can grant Kissflow access to all the finance department employees.
Manages Access When Users Undergo Mid-Lifecycle Transition
In this next phase, entitlement management gets tricky when handled manually. With evolving user access requirements due to changes in role, position, or department or for specific tasks that need to be completed, the IT team struggles to keep track of these changes.
Also, employees had to wait for days to get their app access requests approved because the manual method involved multiple steps. But now, with Zluri's automation, this time-consuming process is eliminated.
Firstly, Zluri integrates with HRSM to keep track of employee data. This integration automatically updates and displays employee details on a centralized dashboard. This way, your IT team can easily access and verify employee information without any manual effort.
This streamlined process ensures that access permissions are always up-to-date and aligned with each employee's current role and responsibilities. Whether granting or revoking access, your team can efficiently manage user privileges based on the most current and accurate information available.
Furthermore, Zluri streamlines the access request process by making it ticketless. It offers an Employee App Store (EAS), a self-serve model, which is a collection of applications pre-approved by your IT team. With this self-serve model, employees enjoy the flexibility of choosing any application from the app store and gaining quick access in no time.
All they need to do is raise a request, and the IT team will verify and review their identity before providing access to the requested application. If approved, employees gain access right away. If access is declined, they receive prompt notifications along with reasons for the decision, any modifications made, or suggested alternatives for the application, all viewable in the "Changelogs."
Securely Revokes All The Assigned Access From Departing employees
When employees' tenure comes to an end due to resignation, termination, or retirement, Zluri securely revokes all the assigned access from departing employees.
Zluri understands that even a single oversight in this process can potentially lead to security breaches, jeopardizing data security. So to address this concern, it offers a solution i.e. to automate the deprovisioning process. With a simple click, your IT team can easily remove access from employees, ensuring that all necessary steps are taken. This automation ensures that access is revoked in a timely and comprehensive manner, protecting SaaS app data from security risks like unauthorized access.
Furthermore, to automate the process, your team can simply create an offboarding workflow. All they need to do is select the users from whom they want to revoke app access and then they will come across a list of recommended actions (such as signing out users, removing them from org units, and more).
Your team can choose one or multiple actions at once from the list; a point to note is that these actions will be executed post the deprovisioning process. Once all desired actions are added, your team can run the workflow instantly or save it as a playbook for future use.
3. Govern User Access Thoroughly With Zluri’s Access Review Capabilities
Lastly, to ensure every user within the organization has authorized access to the SaaS app and data and their access rights align with their roles and responsibilities, Zluri conducts timely access reviews as well as automates the entire access reviewing process. Since manual access reviewing can be time-consuming and inefficient, IT teams to gather user lists, user statuses, access patterns, and all the apps to which users have access.
Moreover, Zluri prioritizes data security and compliance which are core concerns of most organizations. So for that, it also conducts access reviews and effectively manages entitlements to avoid any potential security risks.
You must be wondering how does Zluri streamline the access review process. Well, it offers you some unique features that are listed below.
Unified Access Review
Zluri’s unified access review feature allows your IT team to identify which users have access to all SaaS apps and data. Where does Zluri get all these insights from? Well, it has an access directory where all the user access-related data is stored in one central place.
Further, with the help of these insights, including whether the users are admins, regular users, which departments they belong to, and more, your IT team can examine the access privileges of users and ensure their access aligns with the roles.
Additionally, to keep things running smoothly, Zluri’s activity & alerts capabilities come into play. This feature provides real-time information about the last activities users performed and notifies IT teams about any new logins. With the help of these insights, reviewers can make quick and informed decisions during access reviews, ensuring the right people have the right access at all times.
Automated Access Review
No more manual headaches with spreadsheets and JSONs! Zluri takes the hassle out of access reviews by automating the entire process. Just head to Zluri, create a certification, and select the apps and users you want to review, and the rest of the reviewers will review and update you about the compilation via email.
So, by automating this process, you get 10 x better results than manual methods and save your IT team's efforts by 70%. Now let’s move ahead and see how it works.
Once you have gained access to contextual data through Zluri’s unified access feature, you can step further by creating access rules around these insights. For example, if someone is an admin on Salesforce, you can easily set up a review policy specifically tailored to that scenario.
Next comes the schedule certification feature, where you can create certifications based on the gathered information. This allows you to take action based on the insights you've gained. For instance, you can use data like last login, departments, user status (active or inactive), and more to make informed decisions during the review process, such as whether the user can carry on with the existing access or need any modification.
With Zluri's context-rich information, your team can confidently take actions that align with your access management policies. It's a smarter, more efficient way to ensure the right access for the right users, all while keeping your data secure. Zluri's automated access reviews and access rules are the key to simplifying your access governance process.
Here’s how you can create access certification in Zluri:
Step 1: From Zluri’s main interface, click on the ‘Access Certification’ module.
Step 2: Now select the option ‘create new certification.’ You have to assign a certification name and designate a responsive owner to oversee the review.
Step 3: Under Set Up Certification, choose the ‘Application’ option. Proceed further by selecting the desired application for which you want to conduct the review and choose a reviewer (generally, the primary reviewers are the app owners) accountable for reviewing access to that particular application.
After that, you need to select the fallback owner/reviewer, if the primary reviewer is unavailable, the fallback owner can review the user access (you can select anyone for the fallback reviewer whom you think is responsible enough). Also, the reviewers will get notified through the mail that they will conduct a review.
Once you are done selecting the reviewers, you can click on Next.
Step 4: Select Users for Review; choose the users whom you want to review for the selected application. Once you are done selecting the users, click on next. You will be able to view all the information related to the users. Then you need to specify the criteria or parameters such as user department, job title, usage, and more. Now click on update and then click on next.
Note: Select those relevant data points only that you wish your reviewers to see while reviewing the access. By filtering the criteria appropriately, you enable your reviewers to make swift and well-informed decisions, streamlining the review process and ensuring efficiency.
Step 5: Now, the Configure Action page will appear; basically, here, you have to choose actions. These actions will run after the review.
There are three actions:
Approved- Once reviewers approve the user access, Zluri won't run any action, the users can continue with their same access without any interruption.
Rejected- when the reviewer declines or doesn’t approve the user access, you have to run a deprovisioning playbook to revoke the access of that application from the user. If the user has access to critical apps, then you can request the assigned reviewer to manually deprovision the user access, or else Zluri will auto-remediate if it’s not critical access.
Modify- In this last case, you again need to create a playbook to modify the user access. However, you need to state whether the access permission needs to be upgraded or degraded.
Step 6: Additionally, you can even schedule the actions by setting up the start date and within what time span you want the review to be completed.
Step 7: Lastly you can keep track of the automated access review process by clicking on the ‘Review Status’ and view whether the review is still pending, modified, declined, or approved.
Also, you can add multiple applications and follow the same process for each selected application.
Zluri also provides the owner access to a snapshot view of the entire certification process status. Also, they can get an overview of the pending reviews and monitor the status of each app’s review, including their assigned reviewers and their completion status.
You can even send reviewers reminders who are yet to complete their reviews.
Further to streamline the process for reviewers, Zluri provides reviewers with all the user access data in a single screen, i.e. reviewer screen. For the same screen, reviewers can approve, modify, and decline access by verifying the data, and also they have to add relevant comments on the same.
Now, you will be able to view the entire status of the review process on the chart once the process is completed and the owner (assigned reviewer of the certification process) is fine with the review. You can click on conclude, and it will send the reports to the reviewers' email.
Secure access orchestration/auto-remediation
After completing the access review, necessary changes will take place as per the set actions during certification creation, so all these actions, like access modification or removal, are part of secure access orchestration. It's the seamless process that ensures access is managed securely and efficiently, safeguarding your organization's data and resources.
For example, while creating a new certification in Zluri, your team will come across configuration action under which they need to create deprovisioning playbooks and modification playbooks. If the reviewers decline the access permissions, then automatically the deprovisioning playbook will run and same goes for the modification playbook. Also, for both scenarios, the reviewers need to provide relevant reasons stating why the access permission is declined or modified.
Point to note-These: These actions will take place automatically post the review. That's why this process is also known as the auto-remediation process.
Apart from that, Zluri also offers integration features that are quite beneficial at the time of gathering access data. Though Zluri already has data within its platform, but integration allows it to gather even more valuable insights. Leveraging these integrations further enhances your access review process and strengthens the overall security posture of the organization.
For example, the top priority for the company is to review the identity system and core applications, as they pose the highest risk. The Identity System, which stores crucial employee data, requires timely and thorough reviews to ensure security. So what Zluri does is it integrates with Salesforce, Okta, Azure, and other applications. Further, these integrations play a crucial role in gathering identity system and SaaS app data, providing valuable insights and streamlining the review process.
Additionally, Zluri generates reports that are commonly associated with audit logs or audit trails. These audit reports serve as valuable documentation to share with auditors or keep as a reference for future reviews. And audit trails act as roadmaps, showcasing the changes made during previous reviews.
For instance, if an employee's admin-level permissions were changed to user-level, it becomes essential to review and ensure that the access remains appropriate or if there were further changes back to admin. Understanding the reasons behind any upgrades is crucial for maintaining proper access control.
So Zluri automatically generates reports on such changes, which further helps in the reviewing process.
So why wait? Book a demo now and witness how Zluri enables your GRC team to streamline identity governance.
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