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Recertification or attestation is the process of continually auditing permissions to make sure the access provided is only the access that is needed. With Access Recertification, you can implement technology control that enables the review of regularly reviewing and verifying user access rights to see if they are proper and comply ensure they align with the company's internal rules and business needs. 

Every organization should have a periodic recertification procedure for its IT resources. As a result of recertification, a manager, responsible party, or system owner certifies users' access to a system to guarantee they only have access to what they require. EmpowerID provides a powerful Recertification platform that allows any organization to take a more proactive approach to rectify potential security issues before they occur with the help of EmpowerID Recertification Policies and Audits.

The purpose of the recertification is to present the system data to the auditors and to ensure that there are no nonconformity findings during audits. user's role, company policies, and regulations. For example, In the account validity recertification process, a responsible person (manager, supervisor, responsible party, or other designated person) checks the user’s account of the users and decides whether this account should continue to exist or not.

Why is recertification needed?

Implementing a recertification procedure can safeguard a corporation from potential security breaches and fines. To guarantee It is an essential component of governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) programs, as it helps organizations meet regulatory requirements, mitigate security risks, and prevent data breaches. Depending on the industry and regulations that apply to the organization, Recertification may need to be performed regularly, such as annually or semi-annually.

Recertification is necessary to ensure that only authorized personnel has access to the enterprise's data, owners of key business data must verify that all access entitlements and privileges are recertified regularly. Access recertification ensures that no users have access to resources that aren't assigned to them.Depending upon the size of the company, whether public or non-pubic and the industry they are in, such as banking or finance, etc., many companies are required by law to perform recertification or attestation of minimize the risk for all risky accesses, and prevent potential security breaches. Recertification is not just about checking and validating unauthorized access. A company would also like to have risk management in place to prevent people from getting toxic combinations of access that could be a risk to the company. For example, a person might get access to create a purchase order and approve the same purchase order. This is a toxic combination of access and potential company risk.

Therefore, to minimize the risk for all the risky accesses, we should be able to certify and recertify regularly that the access is still needed. For example, do you know if this user account is still required? The user account should not be active if a user has already resigned from the company. These kinds of potential risks are checked and minimized with the help of recertification at regular intervals.

What is a recertification audit?

The review of user access rights to see if they are proper and correspond to the organization's internal rules and compliance standards is known as an access recertification audit. The recertification is often implemented as an audit.

An audit can be considered a project with a start and end date. We can audit or certify multiple items using an audit. For example, in a Q1 audit, we should certify an external partner identity and attest a member of certain high-risk management roles. These items are specified in one or more recertification policies. EmpowerID maintains an audit trail of these access snapshots and the decisions made concerning the access. EmpowerID recertification audits can be scheduled to run periodically, such as on a quarterly or monthly basis, weekly, daily, or at will.

What is the recertification policy?

A recertification policy contains actions to ensure that users submit an assurance that they have a genuine, continuous need for a particular resource or membership. As a project might have multiple deliverables, a recertification audit can have multiple recertification policies associated with it. , which can be mitigated by Recertification.

EmpowerID provides a powerful Recertification platform that allows any organization to take a more proactive approach to rectify potential security issues before they occur. With the help of the recertification features provided by EmpowerID, organizations can automate the process of collecting data, presenting data to auditors, reviewing and verifying, and removing user access rights.

Recertification Policy & Recertification Audit

A Recertification Policy is a set of guidelines and procedures that an organization establishes to ensure that access rights are reviewed and verified to align with the user's role, company policies, and regulations. The policies outline which users and what access rights will be reviewed. With a Recertification Policy in EmpowerID, you can define

• Type of access to recertify.

• Default decisions for unattended recertification requests.

• Who/What to recertify?

• Which data/access to recertify?

We can create recertification policies of different types in the EmpowerID system, which are reusable. For example, we should certify an external partner identity and a member of certain high-risk management roles in an audit. These items are can be specified in one or more recertification policies. Recertification Policies are snapshots of data that reveal the access to resources granted to people and to roles, the assignments of people to roles, and the security assignments that have been made against protected resources like Exchange mailboxes, applications, and groups. These snapshots are routed for review to authorized personnel Later these policies can be attached to an Audit.

The review of user access rights to see if they are proper and correspond to the organization's internal rules and compliance standards is known as an Access Recertification Audit. The Recertification is often implemented as an Audit that collects data based on the configurations in recertification policies. EmpowerID collects data about user access rights, including permissions to access sensitive data or systems, and routes the information for review to authorized Auditors such as managers, role owners, or data owners. The review process allows the reviewer to verify the access and certify whether it is valid. Internal processes can use this data to remediate and rectify exceptions or certify the exceptions as permitted.

EmpowerID provides a collection of useful recertification policy types to suit the purpose of a Recertification Audit.

Recertification in EmpowerID

EmpowerID provides a powerful attestation and recertification platform that allows any organization to take a more proactive approach to rectify potential security issues before they occur through crafting EmpowerID audits and recertification policies. Combining recertification policies with EmpowerID's robust reporting capabilities allows organizations to create a more thorough and effective resource management strategy.

Auditors can also designate audits as either one-time or ongoing audits. A snapshot of user access and entitlements is obtained when the initial audit begins. This first snapshot creates an irreversible record of your company's security at the moment. Business requests are produced because of this, and EmpowerID's process-driven approach keeps both users and the work required moving forward to ensure timely completion and correct audit outcomes.
The primary building blocks of recertification are depicted in the below overview diagram.

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For recertification to work in EmpowerID following steps are needed.

The auditors can identify and address any discrepancies or issues with user access rights and ensure that access rights comply with company policies, regulations, and industry standards. Each access generates a business request item which is presented as a task to auditors to help recertify discrepancies and provide access revocation. The data generated in an audit about access are snapshots, meaning the data represents the state it was captured, which will not change. EmpowerID maintains an audit trail of these access snapshots and the decisions made concerning the access.

The recertification policy defines the rules and procedures for reviewing access rights. In contrast, the recertification audit is the actual review of access rights against the company policies and regulations. Since the Recertification of the access is a continuous process, EmpowerID recertification audits can be scheduled to run periodically, such as on a quarterly or monthly basis, weekly, daily, or at will.

Recertification Architecture

This diagram describes the Recertification Architecture of EmpowerID. Detailed information about each process is described below the diagram.

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1. The first step in Recertification in EmpowerID is to create recertification policies, which are reusable definitions or rules that allow you to configure who and what types of access should be audited. These policies can be configured based on organizational rules, including the type, scope, and people. They can be used in multiple audits, saving time and effort compared to defining them each time.

   1. Create a Recertification Policy: Create a recertification policy that defines the type of policy and enables it for audit. You can also configure what should be done if any access recertification is unattended by the auditors.

   2. Add Target to Recertification Policy: Adding a target to a recertification policy configures who or what will be recertified. Recertification policies can target multiple resources and objects, such as a specific location, group, or resource type.

   3. Add Item Type Scope (Data)

   - Adding an

   1. to Recertification Policy: The Item Type Scope

   to the

   1. in a Recertification Policy

   enables

   1. allows users to configure what data

   should

   1. will be collected for

   recertification—adding Target(s) will configure who/what to recertify. In contrast, Item Type Scope will determine which data/access to recertify. Create Recertification Audit - An audit is nothing but

   1. Recertification. The item scope enables users to tailor the recertification process to meet their specific needs, such as specifying the collection of data only for a person's access to a group as a member.

2. Once the policy is defined, Audits will be created by the user. An audit is an end-to-end implementation of recertification.

3. Add recertification policy(s) to recertification audit - An audit needs a recertification policy and its targets so that the compilation of audits can generate at least one business request.

4. Enable and compile the audit - The recertification engine requires the created audit to be enabled so that it can be compiled.

5. Check business requests are generated - The Audits must generate at least one business request due to the compilation of a recertification audit.

6. Check fulfillment is done - The completion of decisions related to access in EmpowerID systems based on an audit outcome is known as fulfillment.

7. Verify the result of recertification - You need to verify that the result of the recertification is correct. Insert excerptIL:External StylesheetIL:External Stylesheetnopaneltruerecertification implementation, meaning the data is collected and certified during an audit.

   1. Create Recertification Audit: In EmpowerID, an audit is a logically named user-defined object for identifying or grouping business requests and running the Recertification policies that generate them. EmpowerID recertification audits can be scheduled to run periodically, such as on a quarterly or monthly basis, weekly, daily, or at will.

   2. Add Recertification Policy to Recertification Audit: An audit can have multiple recertification policies enabling you to granularly configure to collect different types of access data in a single audit. 

8. The EmpowerID recertification engine runs the audit on provided schedule, automatically collecting access data and saving it as snapshots, meaning the data represents the state it was captured, which will not change.

   1. The collected data is used to create Business Requests and Their items. In EmpowerID, each access recertification is a Business Request Item or an automatically generated task request which is presented to auditors as a Business request. The background job Attestion Policy Compiler does the collection of data and generation of business requests. You can follow the instructions in Verify Business Requests are Generated to see if the audit generates the requests.

   2. Auditors and responsible managers provide decisions to Certify, Revoke, and other actions in the business requests. Instruction to Provide Business Requests Decisions These business requests contains details about the access for the person that needs to be certified.

   3. Once the auditors provide the decisions on the business request, the fulfillment workflow picks the decision and fulfills it. The background job Business Request Fulfillment does the fulfillment task based on business decisions.