Why User Access Reviews (UAR) are often a starting point—but not the finish line—for an effective Identity Governance & Administration (IGA) program, along with the primary limitations of relying solely on UAR for governance needs.

1. UAR as a Starting Point, Not the End Goal

• Why UAR is attractive to start with:
  
  • Quick compliance win: Demonstrates to auditors that you are actively monitoring and controlling who has access.
  • Relative simplicity: A process where managers review a list of user entitlements and approve/remove them.
• Why UAR alone isn’t enough:
  
  • IGA is about continuous governance—ensuring the right people have the right access at all times. UAR is just one mechanism to validate access, not the entire governance framework.

2. Key Limitations of User Access Reviews

1. Point-in-Time Nature
   
   • Challenge: Access reviews are often done quarterly or annually.
   • Impact:
     
     • Organizational changes (hires, promotions, terminations, department shifts) can happen frequently.
     • This creates a gap between reviews where users might accumulate improper access, even if they had correct access during the last review.
   • Mitigation:
     
     • Implement automated provisioning/deprovisioning workflows.
     • Introduce continuous monitoring or real-time triggers for role changes and terminations.
2. Limited Compliance & Security Coverage
   
   • Challenge: Many organizations start UAR focusing on critical or in-scope applications to meet a specific compliance requirement (e.g., SOX, HIPAA).
   • Impact:
     
     • Other applications remain unchecked, which can still pose security or compliance risks.
     • True “least privilege” goes beyond the few core applications in formal audits—it must extend to all critical systems, including cloud services and SaaS applications.
   • Mitigation:
     
     • Gradually expand UAR coverage to include more applications.
     • Integrate applications into a centralized identity platform for consistent policy enforcement.
3. Restrictive by Nature
   
   • Challenge: UAR typically focuses on removing excessive or outdated access.
   • Impact:
     
     • It doesn’t solve for the larger, continuous goal of ensuring users always have the right access when they need it (e.g., upon onboarding or role changes).
     • Without an automated provisioning approach, managers may under-provision users out of caution, which can harm productivity.
   • Mitigation:
     
     • Complement UAR with user lifecycle management (joiner, mover, leaver processes).
     • Implement request-and-approval workflows to grant new privileges accurately and maintain an audit trail.

3. Moving Beyond UAR to Comprehensive IGA

1. Automated Provisioning & Deprovisioning
   
   • Ensures timely and accurate access grants for new hires and revokes access for departures.
   • Reduces reliance on reactive, periodic reviews.
2. Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) / Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC)
   
   • Standardize role definitions to streamline who should have which entitlements.
   • Lower the burden on managers by eliminating the need to micromanage individual access rights.
3. Integration & Coverage
   
   • Connect more applications and data sources to a central identity infrastructure.
   • Gain a single pane of glass for monitoring, reporting, and automated policies.
4. Continuous Compliance & Monitoring
   
   • Move from a point-in-time review to continuous detection of anomalous access or segregation-of-duties violations.
   • Use real-time triggers to update access when a user’s department, title, or location changes.
5. Periodic (But More Targeted) Reviews
   
   • Shift to risk-based or event-driven reviews (e.g., only reviewing privileged or high-risk access periodically).
   • Free up manager and audit teams to focus on high-impact issues rather than blanket reviews.

4. Key Takeaways

• UAR ≠ Full IGA: Access reviews alone address some compliance goals but leave gaps in real-time identity governance.
• Frequent Changes Demand Automation: Because roles and employees change often, a purely manual review process is inherently prone to drift and errors.
• Complement Reviews with Lifecycle Management: A robust, end-to-end IGA strategy involves automated provisioning, deprovisioning, ongoing monitoring, and analytics.
• Expand Coverage Over Time: Start with critical apps for compliance, but ensure you have a plan to include other systems that might introduce risk.

By understanding these constraints and limitations, organizations can avoid the trap of viewing user access reviews as a “silver bullet.” Instead, they can position UAR as a foundational element of a broader, more dynamic IGA program that delivers continuous compliance, reduced risk, and operational efficiency.

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