In the last few years, several prominent security-related incidents have originated from inefficient governance of identities such as the Equifax data breach in 2017 where data of 147 million identities was compromised or the Microsoft Exchange Server data breach in 2021 which affected 30,000 organizations from 150 countries. Data theft, loss of personally identifiable information (PII), and industrial espionage through unauthorized access are severe security risks in every industry. Organizations struggle with centralized visibility for identifying who has access to what, who has accessed what and why, and who granted that access.
Access governance concerns the access mechanisms and their relationships across IT systems. As an IAM-focused risk management discipline, access governance focuses on providing centralized visibility for access. It is instrumental in monitoring and mitigating access-related risks. Current access governance solutions provide continuous monitoring of the ecosystem of applications and systems within an organization. Removing risks, enforcing compliance, and automating processes provide security against access breaches and data leaks.
Oracle Access Governance
Oracle Access Governance satisfies the above-mentioned requirements expected from an access governance solution. It is a comprehensive tool for fostering the security posture and helping protect organizations against breaches, as well as supporting them in managing access of identities to IT systems within an enterprise. Oracle Access Governance is a cloud-native solution that also supports meeting compliance requirements by automating the processes with machine learning driven recommendations. This provides greater visibility into the access structure of the entire organization’s IT environment.
Oracle Access Governance runs as an OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure) cloud-native service. It can detect and remediate high risk privileges by enforcing internal access audit policies to identify orphaned accounts, unauthorized access, and privileges. All of this helps to enhance compliance to regulatory requirements (e.g., Sarbanes-Oxley, 21 CFR Part 11, Gramm-Leach-Bliley, HIPAA, and GDPR).
Oracle Access Governance can run alongside Oracle Identity Governance in a hybrid deployment model to provide identity analytics from the cloud to Oracle Identity Governance customers. Following are the major features of Oracle Access Governance:
- Automated access reviews: The solution simplifies access reviews through automation and provides insights for making decisions for high-risk access requests.
- Machine Learning Based Workflows: Oracle Access Governance uses prebuilt ML-based workflows to further simplify the access review campaigns. The inbuilt model suggests workflows by reviewing use cases and recommending the designated next steps.
- Insight-driven Dashboard: The insight-driven dashboard provides information related to tracking access review trails, real-time analytics, and powerful filters to focus on high access review priority tasks. The dashboard further provides a risk assessment of each activity using peer group analysis.
- Cloud Identity Governance: it provides simplified identity orchestration that can collect data about OCI users, groups, and policies across multiple tenancies and compartments, and recognize unseen patterns for security threat and violation with real-time risk and threat monitoring. It also identifies over-provisioned accounts.
- Access Control: Oracle Access Governance provides access control mechanisms like Request/approval-based, Role-based, Attribute-based, Policy-based and a combination of these access controls mechanisms.
- Fulfilment/Identity Orchestration: The solution simplifies system integration by providing downloadable agents for systems behind firewalls, handing integration for systems in public domains, providing prioritization of authoritative target systems and supports correlation and all of it without the need for coding.
- Flexible Licensing Model: It allows customers to mark users as active or inactive and as workforce vs. customer. Only the active users are considered for billing.
Conclusion
Organizations of all sizes and in all industries need access governance to protect digital assets, their data and comply with regulations. Good access governance products address these issues. Oracle’s Access Governance provides the modern tooling required to govern access to the identities within an enterprise and proactively address risks. The centralized visibility required to achieve trustworthy access governance is possible through its various features, such as the use of automation and machine learning, event-based micro-certifications, and a transparent and effective dashboard. With multiple access control mechanisms, Oracle Access Governance enables provisioning and entitlement management to ensure compliance while providing better flexibility. Oracle Access Governance improves orchestration and provides a flexible licensing model. It is a solution that is attractive to customers in various industries.