Understanding the concept of role management is essential while implementing an Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) solution. Especially understanding role management features, practices and concepts as well as their resulting implications for access control are important. Role Management is a crucial part for several stakeholders like the IT infrastructure or CISOs/CSOs and other business leaders. Using an effective role management with an existing Identity Access Management (IAM) solution can strengthen the overall security, reduces risk exposure and can lead to successfull compliance with regulatory requirements. In this post, we will provide you a general overview of the fundamentals of role management as a best practise of modern IGA strategy.
What is role management?
Role management is a system for managing and assigning user rights in a company. A role combines a collection of authorizations that are assigned to a user or user group. These roles give users specific access rights that determine which actions they are allowed to perform in the system. The assignment process ensures that each user receives the necessary rights to perform their tasks. Role management allows the administration of access rights to be organized efficiently and clearly. It helps to increase security and control access to sensitive data and resources.
How does role management work?
Role management is a system that facilitates the administration and assignment of user rights and authorizations in an organization. The process begins with the definition of roles within the IT infrastructure that correspond to the various positions, functions and locations within the company. Authorizations are then created or existing authorizations are used and assigned to these roles. Organizations create access rules for specific resources to control which role groups can and cannot access which assets.
An example of this is where a company only wants to grant access to certain sensitive assets to certain role groups, while denying access to others. Role management allows an organization to design and manage access policies independently of individual users. This makes it possible to grant access to restricted resources only to certain role groups and to flexibly assign, change or remove user roles in the event of organizational changes.
Role-based access control (RBAC) allows organizations to assign multiple roles to users. For example, a manager in the sales department could have access rights for both management and sales applications. Each role has specific permissions, and a sales manager who belongs to both roles would receive both sets of permissions. By managing user roles, organizations have the flexibility to change permissions for user groups without having to make changes to the existing IT infrastructure. This makes provisioning and de-provisioning users much easier and improves security and compliance.
What is the difference between user management and role management?
User management and role management are two different approaches to managing access rights in an organization. User Management on the one hand focuses on the individual user accounts and the specific permissions assigned directly to each user. This often requires manual changes if a user needs new rights or existing rights need to be changed.
Role management, on the other hand, organizes permissions via roles that bundle different access rights. Users are assigned roles and the rights granted to them are determined by the associated roles. This simplifies administration, as changes to access rights can be made by adjusting the roles without having to edit each individual user separately. While User Management aims to manage user rights directly, Role Management offers a more centralized and efficient method by defining rights at role group level.
What are the benefits of using role management?
- Enhanced security and compliance measures: Role management mitigates the risk of data breaches, insider threats, and other security incidents. Assigning roles with appropriate system entitlements confines the potential damage from malicious activities or human error. Additionally, user role management assists organizations in complying with regulatory requirements for accessing sensitive data.
- Better access control: Role management streamlines role assignment for administrators by allocating roles to users, ensuring access is tailored to their specific roles and responsibilities. This approach establishes the principle of Least Privilege, granting users only the necessary access levels for their tasks, strengthen security and averting unauthorized access to sensitive assets.
- Efficiency enhancement and cost reduction: By using role management an organisation can optimize their resource allication and reduce operational overhead. Especially evolving organisations benefit from the automating possibilities of role management.
- Audit proof: The auditing capabilities of role management can track which user has a specific system entitlement in a timeframe. All changes to roles, system entitlement and users are tracked and provide visibility and transparency.
What are some practical experiences using role management?
Practical applications for role management with NEXIS 4 can be found in various industries. One example is role mining in regulated industries such as finance and insurance. Here, the use of role management is crucial to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive customer information.
If you are interested in more details, take a look at the success story of our customer MAN Financial Services.
Conclusion
The reasons to use role management are manifold and clear: The introduction of role management tools offers an efficient way of assigning access rights in an organization. The standardization of roles and permissions minimizes errors and increases security. The principle of least privilege is supported by granting users only the authorizations required for their tasks. Role management simplifies compliance by making it easier to monitor and adhere to data protection guidelines. Overall, role management tools enable efficient, secure and compliant administration of access rights.
Using a modern IGA like NEXIS 4 effectively automates the role management process and supports you during the role mining process effectivly and with strong visualitation and analytics functionalities. The product reduces the amount of manual work and results in a streamlined role model with a transparent access management process. NEXIS 4 is your comprehensive zero-code tool with which your IT can provide practical solutions for authorization management in a time-saving, targeted and user-friendly manner. At every application level in your company.