Role Mining Overview

Role mining is the process of analyzing an organization’s existing access assignments to discover and define security roles. These roles help streamline access management by grouping users with similar access needs based on their job functions, locations, or responsibilities. Properly defined roles ensure that users are granted the least privilege necessary to perform their tasks, reducing the risk of over-provisioning and security vulnerabilities.

For large organizations, manually managing user access individually can be costly, inefficient, and prone to errors. Role mining automates this process by identifying patterns in user access and creating roles that align with organizational needs. This helps organizations maintain compliance, optimize access control, and reduce administrative workloads.

Role Mining and Optimization

EmpowerID's approach to role mining is rooted in Compliant Access by Design, a strategy that ensures organizations can map out appropriate access for employees, partners, and customers in advance. This proactive approach reduces the need for costly and inefficient manual processes, which can lead to security vulnerabilities and project delays.

The EmpowerID Role Mining engine solves this challenge by recommending an optimal set of roles based on a combination of HR job position data and existing access assignments. These initial roles are dynamic and evolve in response to changes in the business environment, such as reorganizations or mergers. EmpowerID’s role optimization further ensures that roles are aligned with the least privilege principle, maintaining compliance and minimizing security risks.

To implement Compliant Access effectively, EmpowerID relies on external sources of business role data, which serve as the foundation for role mining.

Leverage Existing Sources of Business Role Infomation

Establishing business roles and organizational locations is essential in implementing Compliant Access. EmpowerID simplifies this process by leveraging data from HR or Human Capital Management (HCM) systems and Active Directory. Systems like Workday, SuccessFactors, or SAP HCM store valuable organizational structures and employee position data, which EmpowerID uses to perform its analysis.

EmpowerID inventories external roles and user assignments through out-of-the-box connectors, generating an initial Business Role and organizational location tree. This automated data-driven approach ensures continuous compliant access delivery. Any changes made in the authoritative HR system, such as role changes or promotions, automatically trigger a reevaluation of user access to ensure compliance without manual intervention.

During role design, EmpowerID also performs Separation of Duties (SoD) simulations to ensure that proposed roles do not create conflicts, further enhancing compliance and security.

With business role data in place, EmpowerID applies its sophisticated top-down role mining techniques to optimize access management.

Top-Down Analytical Role Mining

EmpowerID's Top-Down Analytical Role Mining technique analyzes organizational security models and ensures access entitlements align with business roles. This method ensures that each user’s access is appropriate for their position and that roles reflect the organization’s structure.

Top-down role mining uses data from HR systems, which are typically the primary maintained source of employee position information. Since job assignments, promotions, and organizational locations are constantly updated in these systems, EmpowerID relies on this up-to-date data to determine and maintain appropriate roles.

Top-Down Analytical Role Mining Process

EmpowerID inventories all user entitlements and access assignments across systems, not just HR, and optimally aligns them with the business role and location structure. This process involves analyzing how users' existing access fits within predefined business roles. Once EmpowerID identifies the optimal matches, these role-based assignments are published, ensuring they can be managed and updated through automation based on HR data.

Although top-down role mining covers many access assignments, bottom-up role mining, which refines more dynamic access needs, can address additional unstructured access patterns.

Bottom-Up Role Mining

While top-down role mining focuses on defining structured roles based on business functions, Bottom-Up Role Mining complements this by optimizing more fluid, unstructured access that isn’t easily categorized by traditional role definitions. This includes access related to team-based or matrix-based structures and exceptions.

EmpowerID’s machine learning algorithms drive Role Mining Campaigns, analyzing user and entitlement data to identify candidate roles. These candidate roles are reviewed, fine-tuned, and either published as Management Roles or mapped to existing business roles and locations. This step ensures that even less formalized access is controlled and optimized alongside structured business roles.

By combining top-down and bottom-up techniques, EmpowerID provides a comprehensive solution to role mining that covers all areas of user access.

Streamlining Recertification

One key advantage of EmpowerID’s role mining and optimization is its impact on recertification. After defining roles through top-down and bottom-up mining, organizations can significantly reduce the number of direct access assignments that managers must certify. This shift minimizes the administrative burden while improving overall security.

EmpowerID’s approach can reduce the number of direct assignments by up to 80%, presenting managers with a compact list of business-friendly roles to certify. This streamlines the recertification process and ensures managers review roles rather than individual entitlements, making compliance much easier to maintain.

Recertification isn’t the only area where EmpowerID integrates with external systems to simplify role management. EmpowerID also supports organizations working with external role management tools, allowing for even more flexibility in managing access.

Role Modeling Inbox

For organizations that work with external role management tools or consultants, EmpowerID provides the Role Modeling Inbox. This feature integrates external role designs and access changes into EmpowerID, where they are processed using configurable rules. Depending on your organization's governance needs, these changes can be automatically applied or routed through workflow approval processes.

Next Steps

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