Role mining The Top-Down Role Mining feature in EmpowerID is an essential process in identity and access management that helps organizations define and manage user access based on their roles within the organization. By automating the identification and assignment of roles, organizations can ensure that users have appropriate access to resources, enhancing security and compliance.
Top-Down Analytical Role Mining
After analyzing organizations’ security models and data sources for years, EmpowerID developed the Top-Down Analytical Role Mining technique. This method ensures that user entitlements are appropriate for their position, facilitating compliant access. Top-down role mining optimizes access based on three key areas:
The existing business roles within the organization.
The knowledge of which users occupy those roles.
The users’ positions within the company, including their departments and locations.
This comprehensive approach allows organizations to align access with what users do within the organization.
Benefits of Top-Down Role Mining
Top-down role mining improves compliance with regulatory requirements and reduces administrative burdens associated with manual access management. By automating the role assignment process, organizations can more readily adapt to changes in structure and personnel.
Top-Down Analytical Role Mining Process
The Top-Down Analytical Role Mining process leverages existing business roles and user assignments. EmpowerID inventories all user entitlements and access assignments across various systems, not just HR, and optimally aligns them with the business role and location structure. The process involves the following steps:
Data Snapshot: EmpowerID takes a snapshot of existing organizational data to determine roles and role-based access policies.
Data Inventory: Gather access assignments and user entitlements from multiple systems.
Role Analysis: Analyze how users' existing access fits within predefined business roles.
Optimal Role Assignment: Use sophisticated analytical techniques to optimally align existing user access assignments with the business role and location structure.
Publishing Assignments: Once optimal matches are identified, these role-based assignments can be published and managed through automation based on HR data.
Ongoing Maintenance: EmpowerID maintains changes on an ongoing basis to ensure access remains aligned with any changes in user roles, locations, or job assignments.
Although top-down role mining covers a large portion of access assignments, bottom-up role mining, which refines more dynamic access needs, can address additional unstructured access patternstool for administrators aiming to automate user access management within their organizations. By leveraging existing data from authoritative client systems, this feature facilitates a thorough analysis of organizational roles, locations, and group memberships to automate role assignments effectively. The process involves identifying the most suitable group memberships for users based on overlaps in roles and locations, utilizing configurable criteria such as percentage matches and the minimum number of users in each group.
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Key Benefits
A significant advantage of this feature is its ability to streamline the assignment of users to groups that reflect their responsibilities and access needs within the organizational hierarchy. By focusing on specific roles and locations, administrators can ensure that users receive appropriate access rights automatically. This targeted approach not only enhances the accuracy of role assignments but also improves overall efficiency in user access management.
Focused Analysis: Administrators can restrict their investigations to specific groups or organizational units, ensuring that the analysis remains relevant and manageable.
Customizable Criteria: The feature allows for fine-tuning of role mining parameters to generate optimal matches, including the exclusion of certain roles or groups, such as RBAC-assigned roles and dynamic groups.
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Understanding the Process
Top-Down Role Mining operates by examining the existing organizational role and location structures maintained by client systems, particularly HR databases. The feature analyzes these structures alongside user assignments to determine which group memberships can be assigned based on the defined criteria.
By implementing this systematic approach, organizations can enhance their security and compliance posture while simplifying the complexities of user access management. The automated nature of this feature ensures that as new users are added or as roles change, group memberships are updated accordingly, making it a vital tool for efficient user management.
Process Flow
Top-Down Role Mining involves several key steps:
Data Integration: The process begins by importing existing role and group data from authoritative sources like HR systems.
Role Analysis: The system analyzes the relationships between Business Roles and Locations, assessing which users are associated with specific groups.
Group Assignment: Using a mathematical algorithm, the system identifies levels in the role tree where group memberships can be applied based on the overlap of users.
Policy Creation: Once optimal matches are found, organizations create Group Membership policies to automate group assignments for users in specific roles.
Evaluating Data for Criteria
Once data from external sources has been imported into EmpowerID, evaluating this data is crucial for determining effective matches. This evaluation occurs during the compilation process, which creates records of potential RBAC Group Membership policies based on a subset of group data fed to the compilation engine via a “SetGroup of Groups.” Administrators can also compile all groups for possible matches if desired.
By analyzing the overlap between users in specific organizational roles and their group memberships from the compiled data, organizations can automate group memberships for users in certain roles based on their criteria. Generally speaking, matches yielding higher percentages of overlapping individuals in both a given role and location and group are considered better candidates.
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Conversely, if 100% of individuals in a given Role and Location are members of a specific group, that strong correlation indicates a good match for an RBAC Group Membership policy. Organizations can approve and publish this match, and the system will automatically assign all individuals belonging to the Role and Location to that group going forward. Each time a new person is added to the Role and Location, they will automatically be assigned to the designated group.
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By effectively leveraging the Top-Down Role Mining feature, organizations can automate group memberships through RBAC Group Membership policies, ensuring that users receive the appropriate access to groups based on their roles and locations. This targeted automation streamlines the management of user access, reduces administrative burdens, and maintains compliance with security standards. As organizational structures change, EmpowerID's Top-Down Role Mining feature adapts to ensure that access remains aligned with current roles and responsibilities, making it an essential tool for efficient user management.