Fundamentals of Access Certification and Compliance 

Authored by Jerry Aubel, Senior Product Manager

“Audit time and the living is easy!” I suspect the thought of the following access certification review doesn’t have you whistling down the hall, but it doesn’t have to be a burden. User access certification is a critical process for any enterprise. Automating it can make it easy for Identity teams and the business to meet regulatory requirements, deliver successful audit outcomes and improve identity security.  

In its purest sense, access certification validates all access rights for all identities throughout the organization and across systems, data, and IT resources. These certifications could review everything from developers’ database access to third-party partners’ access to remote systems. Many regulations demand that this knowledge be re-assessed regularly to ensure that only the right people have access for the right reason – nothing more, nothing less.  

Automation can make the process fast, simple, and error-free with AI-driven recommendations and a configuration-based model that’s easy to set up with clicks, not code. The solution should be easy to use with little to no friction, ensuring that employees and managers will complete their certifications the first time and every time, all while mitigating the risk of orphaned accounts and over-provisioning by identifying and revoking unneeded user access.   

Improving, Simplifying, and Accelerating Access Reviews with SailPoint Identity Security Cloud  

Access review fatigue is one of the most common causes of audit failure. After seeing too many reviews, managers can end up rubber-stamping access to complete the process quickly and get on with their day job. Identity Security Cloud makes the process easier, more focused, and faster by providing recommendations and guidance and prioritizing high-risk review items to reduce the burden on the reviewer. The solution simplifies the process by allowing users to prioritize or identify categories, such as never reviewed, uncommon and standard access, recently approved items, and/or unchanged items, making the process more business-driven and targeted.   

What does all this mean? At the end of an access certification, you’ll have the evidence necessary for a successful compliance audit that leverages the AI-based recommendations you need to make better decisions in the new world of remote work. SailPoint Identity Security Cloud delivers a broad range of out-of-the-box reports that map to the significant compliance frameworks, including GDPR, FISMA, FIPS, SOX, PCS DSS, and more, as well as a rich set of reporting templates, dashboards, and charts, making it easy to document results.  

It can take months for organizations of any size to complete access certifications – but with SailPoint, those same businesses can achieve their reviews quickly and gain real insights into users’ behavior while maintaining a solid security posture.   

So whistle all you want while you skip down the hallway, away from manual, cumbersome processes, and towards audit and compliance nirvana with SailPoint Identity Security Cloud.