Eviden DirX Audit

Access Governance & Intelligence is positioned as a risk management discipline within IAM that enables business participation in managing access rights across an organization’s IT landscape. Access governance supplies tools for workflows, access entitlements, reporting, access certification campaigns, and Separation of Duties (SoD) checks to meet security and compliance obligations. Access intelligence builds on governance by adding business-relevant insights using analytics and machine learning techniques for pattern recognition that can optimize processes, improve role design, automate reviews, and detect anomalies. The need is driven by common access-related risks such as information theft, identity fraud, unauthorized system changes, privacy breaches involving PII, and industrial espionage, alongside complex compliance demands created by numerous evolving regulations and inconsistent reporting requirements.

Access governance reduces IAM risk by answering three core audit questions: who has access to what, who accessed what and why, and who granted that access. It does so through capabilities including access warehouses, access certification, analytics, risk management with scoring, access request management, SoD enforcement, and enterprise role management with role mining and role governance.

The report evaluates Eviden DirX Audit as an access analytics and intelligence solution that complements DirX Identity and DirX Access. DirX Audit consolidates historical identity data and audit events, enriches and transforms raw data into actionable information, and provides dashboards, drill-down analysis, correlation, and strong reporting across multiple formats with preconfigured regulatory reports. Version 7.2 introduced architectural and performance enhancements, shifting synchronization to a dedicated service using Spring Boot REST APIs and pulling history data from LDAP. Strengths include centralized event consolidation, KPI-based dashboards, real-time risk reporting, multi-tenant support, and extensibility to non-DirX event sources. Challenges include an outdated history-view UI, missing continuous monitoring/alerting (planned), and no AI/ML features yet.

• Access governance aims to answer: who has access to what, who has accessed what and why, and who has granted that access.
• Access warehouses collect current and previous access information from different systems using connectors or flat file imports.
• DirX Audit provides historical views and reports, dashboards with drill-down, filtering/correlation analysis, and job management for report generation.
• DirX Audit enriches collected audit data with additional user information and transforms raw audit data into structured data.
• DirX Audit supports compliance efforts for regulations including GDPR, HIPAA, SOX, Basel III, GLB, and KWG, and supports ISO27001.
• DirX Audit version 7.2 moved historic data synchronization into a dedicated service on the DirX Audit server.
• DirX Audit version 7.2 uses Spring Boot and RESTful APIs and reads history data from an LDAP directory.
• Reporting output formats include PDF, HTML, XLS, and CSV, with multiple pre-configured reports tied to regulatory requirements.
• DirX Audit can separate tenants using individual databases and message queues.
• A planned audit monitoring capability with a graphical, configurable dashboard is scheduled for Q4 2024.

• “Access Governance & Intelligence is a risk management discipline for IAM.”
• “Access intelligence refers to the layer above access governance that offers business-related insights to support effective decision-making…”
• “Data analytics and machine learning techniques enable pattern recognition to deliver valuable intelligence for process optimization, role design, automated reviews, and anomaly detection.”
• “Access governance concerns the access mechanisms and their relationships across IT systems and thus is instrumental in monitoring and mitigating access-related risks.”
• “Current compliance challenges are related to many different regulations in practice with new measures added and updated regularly.”
• “DirX Audit provides analytical insight and transparency for identity and access tools for auditors, security compliance officers and audit administrators.”
• “DirX Audit uses historical identity data and recorded events from the IAM processes to answer identity questions related to ‘what, when, where, who and why’…”
• “The solution can collect and transform audit events from different sources into a common format.”
• “This provides an interactive and fast analysis of insights into IAM operations.”
• “Ongoing auditing, event monitoring, and alerting is still missing but planned in the next release”