What is Role Management?

Role Management in Identity Governance and Administration

Role Management refers to the process of creating, maintaining, and governing roles within an organization to streamline access control and ensure proper authorization for users. It is a key component of Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) systems, that provide secure, efficient, and compliant identity and access management.

Role Management helps organizations manage the authorization process for users of their sensitive data, applications, and other resources. It enables identity and access managers to specify the resources that users in an IT infrastructure may access. Organizations can use a Role Management process to engage in assigning users to specific role groups such as manager, sales, member, etc. and manage these roles assigned to groups of users as discrete units.

What is a Role and What is Role Assignment?

A role is a collection of permissions, policies, and privileges that define what a user or group of users can access within an organization’s systems and resources. Roles are often tied to job functions or organizational responsibilities.

Role assignment is the process of allocating specific permissions and responsibilities to users within an organization’s IT infrastructure, determining what data and applications they can (and cannot) access, edit, or read. Role assignment helps streamline access control and security management by allowing administrators to manage permissions at a higher level. Assignment permissions at this level promote consistency and reduce the risk of errors or oversight in access provisioning.

Key Components of Role Management

Role Definition

The identification and definition of roles based on organizational structures, business processes, and job functions, such as HR Manager, IT Administrator, or Sales Representative.

Role Assignment

The manual or automatic association of users, through rules or policies, with roles so they can be granted appropriate access based on their responsibilities.

Role Modeling

The creation of role hierarchies and relationships to simplify management. For example, a “Manager” role may inherit permissions from a “Team Member” role.

Role Mining and Discovery

The analysis of existing user permissions and activities to identify patterns and define roles. Tools can suggest roles based on clusters of similar access privileges.

Role Approval and Certification

The establishment of workflows for approving role assignments and periodic review and certification of roles to ensure they are still valid and aligned with business needs.

Role Lifecycle Management

The modification of permissions, retirement of obsolete roles, or the merger of redundant roles and user roles change over time.

Segregation of Duties (SoD) Enforcement

Designing roles to prevent conflicts of interest, such as a user having both “Requestor” and “Approver” roles in a financial system.

How Role Management Works

After an administrator creates roles in an organization’s IT infrastructure, they must create access rules for specific assets. For example: an IT infrastructure may include assets to which an organization wants to provide access only to specific role groups and deny access to other role groups.

Controlling access to sensitive assets using role management enables an organization to create role assignment policy independent from individual users. Organizations need not grant access to restricted assets to all roles. They can grant access to specific role groups, then provision, de-provision, add, modify, or remove user roles as organizational changes require.

Role Permission Models for Role Management

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)

This method enables organizations to assign users to more than one role assigned. In a sales department, for instance, a manager may have role permissions for both management applications and sales applications.

In this case, each discrete role has a specific set of permissions and a sales manager who belongs to both roles would then have both sets of permissions. When organizations manage user roles, they create flexibility to change permissions for groups of users; enabling them to provision and de-provision users without having to identify and execute changes to the existing IT infrastructure.

Rule-Based Access Control

This extends RBAC by enabling administrators to define access control rules based on conditions or events. Access decisions are based on predefined rules that evaluate conditions such as time of access, user location, or user behavior. Rule-based access control enables more fine-grained control over access permissions and can adapt to changing security requirements or conditions.

Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC)

ABAC makes access control decisions by evaluating various attributes of users, resources, and the current context. These attributes can include user roles, user attributes (such as department or location), resource attributes (such as sensitivity or type), and environmental factors (such as time of access or network location).

Mandatory Access Control (MAC)

This access control model is commonly used in highly secure environments, such as government or military systems. The model bases access decisions on security labels assigned to users, processes, and resources, which are typically set by system administrators. In the MAC model, users can only access resources with matching or compatible security labels, and access cannot be overridden.

Discretionary Access Control (DAC)

In collaborative environments where users need more control over access to their own resources, the DAC model grants users control over the access permissions of resources they own. Owners may grant or revoke access permissions to other users or groups at their discretion.

The Benefits of Role Management in IGA

Improves Security

Assigns roles with appropriate permissions that enforce the principle of least privilege and limits the potential damage caused by malicious acts or human error, reducing the risks of data breaches, insider threats, and other security incidents.

Simplifies Access Management

Centralizes control over permissions in a structured and automated manner, making it easier to manage large user bases and eliminating the effort required to manage user access and permissions individually. This streamlines administrative tasks such as onboarding new resources.

Enhances Compliance

Auditing capabilities provide visibility and transparency into user activities and track changes to roles and permissions to facilitate adherence to regulatory standards.

Boosts Operational Efficiency

Role management automation optimizes resource allocation and reduces operational overhead. Role management systems scale to enable administrators to easily add, modify, or remove permissions to user roles as needed.

Where to Get Help

Using a SaaS-based IGA solution like Omada Identity Cloud effectively automates Role Management and role assignment and reduces the amount of manual work to execute these processes. The result is a streamlined access management processes that enables organizations to phase out legacy systems and cut costs while still adhering to compliance requirements and maintaining business continuity. Schedule a demo.