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 user access rights to see if they are proper and comply with the company's internal rules and business needs.Â
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. For example, In the account validity recertification process, a responsible person (manager, supervisor, responsible party, or other designated person) checks the 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 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 access. A company would 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. 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 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 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.
For recertification to work in EmpowerID following steps are needed.
Pre-requisite jobs should be started and running - Please ensure that the following jobs are enabled and running.
Attestation Policy Compiler Job
Business Request Fulfillment Job
Create recertification policy - The frequency with which users must validate their requirement for a resource or membership is defined by a recertification policy. The policy also specifies what happens if the receiver refuses or does not reply to the request for recertification. Recertification policies employ a set of alerts to kick off the recertification process's workflow operations.
Add target(s) to recertification policy - The recertification policy targets define the recertification scope. Recertification policies may target many resources and memberships. For example, whether this recertification audit covers employees of a particular city or an entire organization.
Add Item Type Scope (Data) - Adding an Item Type Scope to the Recertification Policy enables users to configure what data should 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 an end-to-end implementation of recertification.
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.
Enable and compile the audit - The recertification engine requires the created audit to be enabled so that it can be compiled.
Check business requests are generated - The Audits must generate at least one business request due to the compilation of a recertification audit.
Check fulfillment is done - The completion of decisions related to access in EmpowerID systems based on an audit outcome is known as fulfillment.
Verify the result of recertification - You need to verify that the result of the recertification is correct.