Recertification is the process of regularly reviewing and verifying user access rights to ensure they align with the 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 and decides whether this account should continue to exist. 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, 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, 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 can be specified in one or more recertification policies. 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Add Item Type Scope (Data) to Recertification Policy: The Item Type Scope in a Recertification Policy allows users to configure what data will be collected for 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.
Once the policy is defined, Audits will be created by the user. An audit is an end-to-end recertification implementation, meaning the data is collected and certified during an audit.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.