What is Application Access Governance?

What is Application Access Governance?

Application Access Governance encompasses the processes, policies, and tools used to manage, monitor, and secure user access to applications in an organization’s IT infrastructure. It ensures users have appropriate access to applications and data to minimize access management risks such as unauthorized user access, non-compliance with identity security violations, and data breaches.

Application Access Governance is a subset of Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) that emphasizes access governance within individual applications, including enterprise software like ERP systems, collaboration platforms, and custom applications.

Key Objectives of Application Access Governance

• Access Control: Application Access Governance enforces organizational rules to ensure users only have access to applications and data necessary sufficient to fulfill their job roles and Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and least privilege principles are being followed.
• Compliance and Auditing: Ensure access policies align with regulations such as GDPR, SOX, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS and maintain log trails to demonstrate compliance during audits.
• Risk Mitigation: Identify and resolve risk factors such as excessive access permissions, segregation of duties (SoD) conflicts, and orphaned accounts.
• Visibility and Transparency: Provide centralized visibility into who has access to what within applications and why and facilitate periodic access reviews and certifications to validate appropriate access.
• Automation: Streamline processes for provisioning, de-provisioning, and auditing user access to applications. Automation also drives efficient and accurate reporting and policy enforcement.

Key Components of Application Access Governance

Access Request Management

Application Access Governance tools provide workflows for users to request application access, with approvals based on defined policies.

Role and Permission Management

Definition and management of user roles within applications, ensuring that access permissions align with business requirements.

Access Certification

Application Access Governance tools conduct periodic reviews through which managers verify that users’ application access rights are still appropriate.

Segregation of Duties (SoD) Management

Prevention of conflicts by ensuring no single user has permissions that could enable fraud, such as the capacity to create and approve financial transactions.

Risk Analytics and Reporting

Analysis of access data to identify risks to sensitive applications like excessive privileges or inactive accounts. Tools also generate reports for stakeholders and auditors.

Integration with IGA and Privileged Access Management (PAM) Tools

Application Access Governance integrates with broader IGA and PAM frameworks to provide a comprehensive identity security fabric for an organization.

How Application Access Governance Impacts IGA

Prevents Unauthorized Application Access: Application Access Governance ensures, for example, that a user in the sales department cannot access sensitive HR applications.

• Flags Segregation of Duties (SoD) Violations: Application Access Governance detects when a user has access to applications that give them the ability to both create and approve purchase orders in an ERP system and mitigates this risk.
• Mandatory Access Certification: Managers in the Application Access Governance process are required to review and certify employee access to sensitive applications on a set periodic basis, ensuring that only authorized personnel retain access.
• Real-Time De-Provisioning: When an employee or contractor leaves, the organization, Application Access Governance ensures their access to critical applications is revoked immediately to prevent security risks.

Benefits of Application Access Governance

• Improves security by reducing the risk of insider threats, account misuse, and data breaches.
• Enhances compliance by ensuring adherence to regulatory and internal policy on application access through auditing and reporting.
• Drives operational efficiency by automating application access management processes, reducing manual work, administrative overhead, and human errors.
• Reduces the risk of fraud by enforcing SoD policies and minimizes opportunities for application access misuse.
• Provides centralized oversight and offers a unified view of application access across multiple applications, enabling better identity governance.

Principal Barriers to Implementing Application Access Governance

• Complexity of Applications within IT Infrastructures: Enterprise applications often have intricate permission structures that are difficult to manage.
• Scalability: Managing access across hundreds or thousands of applications requires robust tools and processes that many organizations do not have.
• Dynamic User Roles: Frequent changes in users’ job responsibilities demand real-time updates to access permissions that traditional tools cannot provide.
• Integration Issues: Seamlessly integrating Application Access Governance tools with other tools within Identity and Access Management (IAM) frameworks can be challenging and frequently require complex customization.

Where to Go for Help and Learn More

Application Access Governance is a critical component of a modern IGA strategy. A SaaS-based IGA solution like Omada Identity Cloud adapts to an organization’s specific business needs and offers the connectivity and automation functionalities required to ensure that users have appropriate access to applications throughout the identity management lifecycle. Omada Identity Cloud helps organizations implement the Application Access Governance processes and tools that strengthen compliance and mitigate risks associated with unauthorized or excessive permissions. The result is better security, greater operational efficiency, and simple regulatory compliance. Get a demonstration.