Compliance policies need to keep up with cyber criminals. Regulatory demands on companies are growing, which in turn drives audits. Compliance audits make IT staff nervous—you always hear of an audit as a fire drill for the IT team. If you are a typical enterprise, you probably have a combination of AWS, Office 365, Google Drive, Active Directory, and SharePoint. The more IT sprawl across cloud, custom, and enterprise applications, the greater the risk profile for any IT audit as access control gets difficult to administer and manage. Internal and external auditors are looking for compliance with controls to prevent security incidents.

One of the biggest issues auditors discover is application users being granted inappropriate access. This happens for multiple reasons: most employees request more access than they need, leading to excessive privileges. A typical product or service company is in a mad rush to innovate and deliver new products. Often, in the haste to meet project timelines, managers may be lax with access governance rules.

More often than not, these mistakes are due to managers not fully understanding organizational policies rather than willful omission. Cloning new employees’ user access after another employee is another anti-pattern. For example, Jenna, a new hire, may have her access modeled after Jody, who has been in the company for ten years. Unless Jody’s privileges have been correctly aligned to her current role, Jenna will have excess privileges into systems, file shares, etc. Poorly designed roles can also lead to access issues, granting too much or too little access.

Roles should be aligned with business processes rather than specific users or jobs. Auditors have found situations where a contractor is assigned a role that should be read-only, but during the annual SOX audit, the role was found to have writing capabilities. Below is a comprehensive user access review checklist, highlighting best practices from an auditor’s perspective to help organizations implement better security, efficiency, and compliance.

Define the Scope and Risk Prioritization for Reviews

Defining the scope of the user access review audit checklist is a critical first step. Explicitly list the applications, systems, and resources included in the review. Incorporate risk assessment to prioritize high-risk accounts first. This ensures critical areas are addressed promptly while streamlining audit efforts.

Ingest Applications Data for Identities, User Accounts, and Entitlements

Before beginning access reviews, gather all relevant identity and access data from connected applications. Ingesting data ensures visibility across systems like Active Directory, Salesforce, AWS, or HR systems. This step consolidates:

• Identities – who the users are

   

• User Accounts – the login credentials they hold

   

• Entitlements – their specific access rights or permissions

   

Having a unified dataset of users and their entitlements creates a single source of truth for access reviews. It also helps detect orphaned accounts, excessive privileges, or missing role assignments early in the audit process.

Formalize Process for User Access Reviews

Audit findings can lead to monetary loss and tarnish reputations. Organizations must have a formal process: collect data across all applications periodically, application owners should review user entitlements, and formal documentation should be made of any remediation. Manual access reviews, though not ideal, are better than not having any at all.

Key steps in the user access review checklist include:

• Approving access for active users.

   

• Ensuring unique user IDs aligned with job responsibilities.

   

• Updating access rights when employees transfer roles or change responsibilities.

   

• Implementing a formal access provisioning process before reviews begin.

   

Disable Access for Terminated Employees

Ensuring the swift removal of access privileges when employees leave is critical. User IDs of terminated employees must be deactivated on their last working day, and permissions must be removed across all systems. Maintain logs and verify completion to prevent misuse by former employees. This is an essential step in any user access review audit checklist.

Enforce Segregation of Duties (SOD) & Least Privileges

Every role and entitlement should follow the principles of least privilege and SoD:

• Segregation of Duties: Assign responsibilities to prevent a single user from controlling a critical process. Include maker–checker roles to ensure no individual can approve their own actions.

   

• Least Privilege: Grant only the access required to perform the role. Limiting access reduces risk of unauthorized data access.

   

Auditors expect evidence that these controls are implemented consistently.

Adopt a Zero-Trust Approach for Privileged Accounts

Privileged accounts are prime targets for cybercriminals. Organizations must adopt a zero-trust mindset for these accounts:

• Automate privileged account lifecycle (creation, modification, deletion).

   

• Assign predefined expiry dates for privileged access.

   

• Periodically evaluate access scope and activity.

   

• Monitor activity continuously to detect anomalies.

   

This reduces human error, enforces consistency, and ensures audit readiness.

Manage Adhoc Privileges

Users working on special projects may require temporary elevated access. Ensure:

• Access is scope-limited (read, write, etc.).

   

• Duration is time-bound.

   

• Requests are vetted and approved by the respective manager.

   

Maintain Proof of Compliance & Monitor Deviations

Auditors require evidence to finalize reviews. Organizations should maintain documentation for all audit trails and remediations. Additionally:

• Track unsuccessful login attempts.

   

• Monitor user activity for policy deviations.

   

• Regularly compare access against organizational security policies.

   

This demonstrates a proactive approach to governance and reduces compliance risk.

Document and Share Review Outcomes with Stakeholders

Document all findings, risks, and remediation actions in a report. Share it with key stakeholders:

• IT administrators

   

• Security teams

   

• Department heads

   

• Compliance and audit teams

   

This promotes accountability, ensures awareness, and drives continuous improvement in access governance.

Whether it’s SOX for financial compliance, HIPAA for healthcare, or PCI for credit card data, IT audits are complex. A good user access review checklist combined with identity governance software simplifies the process, enforces IT controls, and demonstrates compliance.

SecurEnds offers a lightweight, highly configurable platform to:

• Load user data from multiple systems of record

   

• Connect dynamically to applications

   

• Match identities with user credentials

   

• Manage heartbeat identities across connected and disconnected systems

   

• Schedule one-time or periodic access recertifications

   

• Generate proof of compliance for external auditors

   

With SecurEnds, your organization can streamline user access reviews, mitigate risks, and maintain audit readiness efficiently.

Step	Action / Best Practices	Notes / Tips
1. Define Scope & Risk Prioritization	Identify all applications, systems, and resources to audit. Prioritize high-risk accounts.	Ensures critical areas are addressed first and resources are used efficiently.
2. Ingest Applications Data for Identities, User Accounts, and Entitlements	Connect all in-scope applications and import user, account, and entitlement data to create a single source of truth.	Ensures complete visibility before reviews begin and helps identify orphaned or excessive access early.
3. Formalize User Access Review Process	Approve active users, assign unique IDs, update access for role changes, and document the process.	Manual reviews are better than none; automation reduces errors.
4. Disable Access for Terminated Employees	Deactivate accounts on last working day and remove all permissions. Verify completion.	Prevents misuse of access by former employees.
5. Enforce Segregation of Duties & Least Privileges	Separate roles (maker/checker), and grant minimum access required.	Auditors expect evidence of SoD and least privilege controls.
6. Adopt Zero-Trust Approach for Privileged Accounts	Automate lifecycle management, set expiry dates, and monitor activity.	Reduces risk of privileged account misuse and human error.
7. Manage Adhoc Privileges	Limit scope (read/write), set duration limits, and approve carefully.	Temporary access must be controlled and documented.
8. Maintain Proof of Compliance & Monitor Deviations	Track login failures, monitor policy deviations, and maintain audit trail documentation.	Ensures compliance evidence is ready for auditors.
9. Document & Share Review Outcomes	Summarize findings, risks, and remediation. Share with IT, security, department heads, and audit teams.	Promotes accountability and continuous improvement.

✍ Article by Abhi Kumar Sood

Book Demo of SecurEnds

 

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AWS’s shared responsibility model is the foundational agreement between the cloud service provider and its customers that defines the distribution of responsibilities associated with security and compliance. Ultimately, it is the responsibility of the organizations to secure their AWS cloud environment. The Capital One breach of 2019 made headlines and drove a deeper understanding of cloud misconfiguration. According to a report from Accurics, misconfigured storage services in 93 percent of cloud deployments have contributed to more than 200 breaches over 2018 and 2020.

Gartner and Forrester have published research and best practices under Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) and Cloud Identity Governance (CIG) respectively. The most alarming statistic around cloud security and highlighted by analysts at Gartner is that “Through 2025, 99% of cloud security failures will be the customer’s fault” so we must keep a close eye on misconfiguration to significantly reduce the risk of cloud failure.

SecurEnds, a SaaS based CISO’s choice of User Access Review product, has worked with a number of its existing clients to understand the role of entitlement reviews in remediating cloud misconfigurations. The sheer scale of number of resources per individual CSP offering, the number of identities (human and service accounts), and permissions makes the case for Cloud Identity Governance. Owning almost half the world’s public cloud infrastructure market, Amazon is the clear market leader.

Based on our recent work with customers wanting to audit entitlements and privileges, we found the following misconfiguration use cases driving the need:

• Failure to remove unused or over-provisioned credentials
• Failure to rotate keys
• Failure to enforce the principle of least privileges for users
• EC2 instances not having proper access to resources
• No audit of “who has access to what” leading to shadow IT
• Failure to check public access to S3 bucket

Organizations looking for a CIEM solution should consider the following checklist of questions:

• Can you manage multiple accounts across multiple cloud providers?
• Does the tool create customizable policies and compliance reports for SOX, NIST etc.
• Can the tool identify relationships between cloud objects and services?
• Can the tool visualize the entitlements and allow action to be taken on security violation?

SecurEnds Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) enables organizations to discover human and machine identities across all of the AWS cloud environment on an ongoing basis. Lack of visibility of who has access to what opens up attack vectors for malicious attackers to exploit. After the discovery of these identities, SecurEnds proprietary Mind Map makes it easy for the admins to undertake access certification or remediation. SecurEnds allows administrators to do access periodic access certifications across all user types. This is of tremendous value because the organizations affected aren’t typically able to identify the misconfigurations until a malicious actor does the damage and it’s too late to protect their sensitive data.

✍ Article by Abhi Kumar Sood

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The user access review process is an important control activity required to ensure that employees, contractors, and partners have the correct rights and permissions within different IT resources and data. This process is run periodically (quarterly or annually) to ensure compliance requirements are met. It also allows companies to undertake continuous improvement initiatives where, based on the access issues, new controls are set up. In general, the following steps are undertaken as a part of this process:

For a complete overview of User Access Reviews, including process and best practices, visit our main guide

1️⃣ Collect a list of users, their roles, and permissions

This step is a laborious and time-intensive process for many organizations as it requires fetching user data from a number of locations for employees, contractors, vendors, and partners. Proper planning improves the efficiency of the process and greatly reduces the effort involved.

2️⃣ Correlate users (identities) to accounts

A user or identity can have different accounts in the system. For example, John Doe can use JD1 to log into an AD-authenticated application and use john.doe to log into Salesforce. Before reviews can be assigned, all accounts belonging to an identity must be tabulated.

3️⃣ Assign reviews to managers or application owners

Depending on the user review process being followed by the organization, reviews can be assigned to either the manager, application owner, department head, or a combination of these.

4️⃣ Resolve or remediate violations

Any time a policy violation is found (i.e. existence of an orphaned account, excessive privilege, etc.), user access must be adjusted. Additionally, the user access review process should create proof of compliance (reviewer name, approval or denial of access, date, etc.) for external auditors, especially if the organization falls under the requirements of SOX, HIPAA, etc. As a best practice, privileged accounts should be reviewed on a monthly basis while accounts in critical systems under SOX, HIPAA, etc. should be reviewed on a quarterly basis.

Manual or Automated?

A question that often arises is whether these reviews should be automated. This is largely a question of efficiency, risk mitigation and compliance than pure preference. Automating the user access process will greatly impact efficiency and accuracy. Automatic data ingestion using connectors makes data collection straightforward. A centralized reviewer dashboard notifies approvers of new reports and ensures the date and approval are tracked with an electronic signoff. The approval is then captured, along with any related change requests, in the documented workflow and stored for future audits.

#1 User Access Review Solution

SecurEnds is the leading user access review solution in the market with its lightweight, highly configurable and industry first flex-connector product that keeps companies secure while meeting audit and compliance requirements. Our software allows you to load user data from multiple systems of record, connect dynamically to applications, match identities with user credentials, manage heartbeat identities across connected and disconnected, schedule one-time or periodic access recertifications, and create proof of compliance for external auditors.

✍ Article by Abhi Kumar Sood

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Written By: Abhi Kumar

The term “identity as the new perimeter” refers to the notion that the traditional network perimeter, which was once the primary focus of security teams, is no longer an adequate means of protecting the sensitive data of an enterprise. The changing nature of labor and technology prompted Gartner to propose the concept “identity as the new boundary” Increasing numbers of businesses have adopted cloud-based services, and employees and contractors have begun utilizing their own devices to access company data and systems outside the network. Historically, firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and virtual private networks (VPNs) were employed to secure the identity. However, as a result of identity going beyond the network for the aforementioned reasons, the network perimeter has become permeable and much more difficult to secure. Recent pandemic exacerbated the transition, and now the user is the new boundary. 

User identities are essential to gaining access to sensitive data and systems, and companies must use a number of best practices and technologies. Here, SecurEnds comes into play. 

SecurEnds is a platform for user access review that automates the process of continually assessing and revoking access for all user kinds. Managing access for third party contractors and vendors is one of the greatest issues organizations confront in terms of user identities. SecurEnds’ universal identity repository enables enterprises to store all user identities in a single area, making it simple to manage and audit access. This centralized visibility can significantly reduce the likelihood of data breaches and other security events. While businesses have developed access controls (RBAC, etc.) to limit the amount of data and resources to which third-party vendors and partners have access, it is common knowledge that privileges increase, resulting in privilege creep. SecurEnds enables businesses to continuously examine user access to retain privileges in accordance with the principle of least privileges. This means that access is checked frequently, not just when a user is allowed access for the first time or when their job changes. This is essential because it prevents the accumulation of stale or unneeded access over time. 

The SecurEnds Solution Engineering Team has assisted hundreds of clients, and we are pleased to present a short-term and long-term plan for securing a company’s new perimeter. Establish a procedure for frequently assessing and revoking access privileges for users who are no longer required. This is a cost-effective method for reducing the possibility of privilege misuse. Implement MFA for all users, including partners and third-party businesses. This is a reasonably inexpensive and simple security technique that can significantly enhance safety. Invest in employee and third-party vendor training and instruction on security best practices and how to recognize and report suspicious activities. In the long term, we recommend CISO to establish a governance program that includes frequent reviews and audits of user types, role types, application importance types. This necessitates a strong use case for budget allocation. 

Our team is ready and available to discuss how we can support you in identifying the best identity governance solution for your specific needs. We understand that every organization has unique requirements, and we are committed to working with you to find the solution that will best meet those needs.

To get started, please click here to schedule a personalized demo with one of our experts.

The post Identity as the New Perimeter: The Importance of Regular User Access Reviews  appeared first on SecurEnds.

Written By : Abhi Kumar

WHAT ARE SERVICE ACCOUNTS?  

Service accounts are a special kind of non-human account that are often used with the intention of automating a wide variety of different system functions. They have their own unique set of permissions and privileges. Service accounts, which are unique to a certain service or application, are analogous to user accounts, which are held by actual persons. Service accounts can be privileged accounts that are utilized by mission-critical applications or services to interact with their respective operating systems, as well as to execute batch files, scheduled tasks, and applications that are hosted across a variety of databases, file systems, and devices.

CHALLENGES IN MANAGING SERVICE ACCOUNTS 

In almost all cases, IT Operations and support staff do not have a complete list of all services running under the context of service accounts.  Because of this, threat actors that want to migrate laterally across the network will often target service accounts as their primary point of entry. It is critical for the organization to have a solid understanding of how service accounts function as well as some best practices for ensuring that service accounts are managed proactively and are kept with the fewest possible rights. As a result of digital transformation and widespread usage of cloud computing, service account management is no longer a one-time effort but rather one that needs ongoing access reviews and remediation.  

 The key challenge in managing service accounts is lack of centralized repository. User accounts are managed in a HR application, and this provides enterprise teams with a single source of truth and an up-to-date, authoritative status that enables automated authorization changes in response to lifecycle events. These changes can include the termination of privileges when they are no longer required.  However, service accounts do not have a single system of record as these are a function of the applications, many of which are under the preview of development teams. The absence of a single source of record for service accounts is a stumbling block for efficient identity governance of service accounts. In addition to this, as the identity of the service account owner is usually unknown it is impossible to enforce service account management and lifecycle changes upon account owner changes.    

BEST WAYS TO HANDLE SERVICE ACCOUNTS  

Adequate management of service accounts requires strong controls and continuous reviews that balance organizations’ need for speed and compliance. Numerous businesses utilize the SecurEnds CEM solution and based on our observations, we offer the following suggestions- while these are our top picks, this list isn’t exhaustive:  

1) Discover all service accounts and categorize them in order of importance, as well as identify the relevant account owners and custodians. After identifying the accounts, re-certification of those accounts should be carried out to determine whether or not there is a real business requirement for each account. This should be done to determine whether or not each account has a valid business need that demands its use. The objective is to minimize the total number of service accounts to must haves in the environment.  

 2) Every company should make it a priority to implement all service accounts in a way that is in line with the principle of granting least privileges to each account. In addition to this, it is required to ensure stringent credential requirements for all the organization’s applications and systems, regardless of the account type, and it must make certain that this policy is strictly enforced. Examples of stringent credential requirements include not storing credentials in text files or scripts. In addition, organizations must change or expire passwords at regular intervals; enforce minimum complexity criteria, utilize and multifactor authentication. 

 3) Conduct continuous attestation or user access reviews of service accounts to know what permissions service accounts have, and if any permissions infringe the established policies or Principles of Least Privileges.   

SecurEnds CEM product enables out-of-the-box compliance and is now being used by several different companies to manage, control, and audit service accounts. You’ll save time thanks to our many data ingestion methods and logic that guarantees that none of your service accounts will go unmanaged. After accounts are profiled, our system enables you to appoint an owner to the service account. The owners will next ensure that the service accounts have the fewest possible rights assigned to them, and they will continue to monitor the use of each service account.  

Companies seldom have the time or personnel to undertake a comprehensive assessment of service accounts across all IT assets because of the growing complexity of IT systems and infrastructure. Using SecurEnds CEM product, companies can considerably decrease the access footprint of service accounts, remove underutilized service accounts, remediate overprovisioned service accounts, and ensure companies are ready for security and compliance audits.

Schedule a demo to see how SecurEnds service account governance solution is CISO’s leading choice. 

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This article was originally featured on Cyber Security Magazine.

Most organizations that undergo quarterly, bi-annual or annual user access reviews (UARs) do so to adhere to regulatory compliance or corporate governance requirements. But as the cybersecurity threat landscape continues to grow rapidly, the lesser-known benefits of UARs – such as minimizing ransomware spread, reducing insider threats, and adhering to IT security best practices – are becoming appealing to companies that haven’t historically embraced UARs due to a lack of regulatory or corporate requirements.

Conceptually, conducting UARs on employee, contractor, and partner access rights, privileges and permissions to various IT resources provides many benefits irrespective of company size. No organization can truly understand the breadth and depth of its cyber risk profile if it lacks complete visibility into network assets and ‘who has access to what.’

Unfortunately, the complexity and cost inherent to operationalizing UARs to date has hindered widespread adoption beyond companies in highly regulated industries and large-scale or publicly traded enterprises with extensive budgets and resources.

Complexity hinders ubiquity

Even for the most streamlined organizations, the process of collecting a list of users, roles, and permissions across all systems then correlating user identities to accounts, assigning reviews to managers or application owners, and resolving or remediating all violations is anything but easy. The process is further complicated by the sprawl across cloud, custom, and enterprise applications that the typical enterprise deploys today.

Making matters worse, organizations conducting UARs have traditionally relied on either manual processes, internally developed software that lacks scalability, or expensive Information Access Management (IAM) solutions which may include superfluous features and are costly to implement and manage. Such solutions all but make it impossible for smaller, non-compliance driven organizations to benefit from UARs.

However, the proliferating regulatory environment – both industry-specific and government-backed – combined with the prevalence of more frequent and sophisticated cyberattacks, has prompted a debate over whether user access reviews should become core to any organizations defense-in-depth strategy, regardless of size, revenue, and regulatory burden.

The cost benefit of democratization

Although democratizing user access reviews sounds reasonable in theory, convincing smaller and unregulated organizations to invest in UARs is not easy, especially when financial penalty for noncompliance may not be a factor. Even organizations open to the idea of adopting UARs might come to argue that the costs outweigh the benefits for their business or that limited financial resources are better spent on more specialized defenses such as email security or security awareness training.

While such arguments have some merit, they fail to acknowledge the utility of UARs beyond visibility into ‘who has access to what.’ Such lesser-known benefits of UARs include:

1. Reduce ransomware impact – Continuous UARs can reduce the occurrence of ransomware stemming from the existence of orphan accounts (an account without a valid owner). By helping organizations remove terminated user accounts, including service accounts, UARs can reduce the potential spread and extent of ransomware across networks, applications, and devices. For example, were Colonial Pipeline to have had regular UARs in place, it is highly possible that the hackers who used a backdoor to access an orphan VPN account as an entry point to its systems could have been stopped before damages occurred.
2. Relieve insider threats – Insider threats can be either malicious or non-malicious. A disgruntled employee with malicious intent and an over-privileged account can prove catastrophic to an organization from multiple perspectives (fraud or intellectual property theft to name a few). A non-malicious insider threat may involve an employee viewing data they should not have access to but without the explicit intention of damaging the organization. UARs address both by allowing organizations to enforce the principle of “least privilege” across all user and system accounts, ensuring users always have correct privileges.
3. Adhere to security standards – ISO 27001 defines a set of standards and “best practices” for information security. Certification is highly advantageous for organizations to ensure appropriate security safeguards are in place for their data. UARs specifically enable organizations to achieve ISO 27001 conformity by meeting the policy requirements of domain A.9., which necessitate appropriate access controls to be established and routinely monitored.

It’s a disadvantage to continue to pigeonhole UARs as security safeguards only relevant to organizations within highly regulated industries or those that are publicly traded. The good news for businesses interested in UARs, but lack the time, money, and resources to implement with any regularity, is that recent innovations have helped automate the process. In doing so, much of the cost and manual-labor burden has been reduced.

In an era increasingly defined by cybercrime, the burden to reduce risk falls squarely on an organization’s ability to implement the most up to date safeguards. While the democratization of UARs certainly won’t eliminate cyber threats completely, doing so would represent significant progress in the right direction.

Learn more about automating user access reviews – Get Started.

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