The Who And When Of Account Recertification

We all know that there are rules and laws in place that mean that organisations must demonstrate that they have control over access to their IT systems. We've all heard about the concepts around recertification of access rights. But what is the best way to certify that the access rights in place are still appropriate and who should undertake that certification task?

Who

A starting point, at least, is to identify who are potential candidates for certifying access rights. They are, in no particular order:

• The account owner themselves
• The account owner's line manager
• The application owner
• The service owner
• The person who defined the role that granted the entitlements

Of course, some of these people may or may not actually exist. In some cases, the person might not be appropriate for undertaking certification tasks. Line Managers these days are often merely the person who you see once or twice a year for appraisals and to be given the good news about your promotion/bonus (or otherwise). Functional Managers or Project Managers may be more appropriate, but can they be identified? Is that relationship with the account owner held anywhere? Unlikely. And definitely unlikely in the context of an identity management platform!

And what about service owners? Maybe this person is the person who has responsibility for ensuring the lights stay on for a particular system and maybe they don't care what the 500,000 accounts on that system are doing? Maybe her system is being used by multiple applications and she would prefer the application owners to take responsibility for the accounts?

And what of the account owner themselves? Self-certifying is more than likely going to merely yield a "yes, I still need that account and all those entitlements" response! But is that better than nothing? Maybe! Then again, maybe the account owner is unaware of what the account gives them. What do they do when they are told they have an AD account which is a member of the PC-CB-100 group, will they understand what that means? For many users, the answer will be no!

Ultimately, the decision as to who is best placed to perform the certification will come down to a number of factors:

• Can a person be identified
• Can the person recognise the information they will be presented with and correlate that with a day-to-day job function
• Is the person empowered to make the certification

There will be a high chance that only one person fits the bill given this criteria!

When

Some organisations like to perform regular recertifications... it's not unusual to see quarterly returns being required. For most people, however, their job function doesn't change too often and a lot of effort will have gone into gathering information which (for the most part) is unchanged from the previous round of recertifications.

Is there a better way?

Merely lengthening the amount of time between cycles isn't necessarily the answer. But maybe recertification can be more "targeted". Rather than a time-based approach, recertification should probably target those people who have undergone some form of change or other life-cycle event, such as:

• Change of Job Title
• Change of Line Manager
• Change of Organisational Unit
• Return from long-term leave
• Lack of use on the account

All of these events can be used as useful recertification triggers rather than waiting for a quarterly review. The benefits are easy to articulate to any CISO - immediate review and more control of access rights.

Of course, these triggers can be used in conjunction with a time-based approach - but maybe that time-based approach should be based on the last time a recertification was performed for that user/account/entitlement rather than a fixed date in the calendar.