Securing user identities is vital to protect company data and ensure compliance with regulations like SOX, GDPR and PCI DSS. Without proper identity security, it’s challenging for organizations to prevent, detect, and respond to identity-based threats.
Fortunately, including lifecycle management strategies like automated provisioning, deprovisioning, and regular audits of user permissions can help. In this article, we’ll explain lifecycle management, how it works, and the benefits of lifecycle management from an identity security perspective.
What is lifecycle management?
Lifecycle management refers to a collection of policies and processes followed to create, adjust, and delete digital identities based on changing circumstances.
Suppose you hired a software engineer. During onboarding, your identity management software creates a digital identity for them with access to development tools and code repositories they need for their job. If they’re later promoted to lead developer, the system automatically updates their permissions to include access to project management tools and team leadership resources. Alternatively, the system will delete their identity if they leave the company.
How does lifecycle management work in identity security?
There are various elements in lifecycle management:
- Provisioning: Provisioning involves granting employees proper access to your company’s applications and systems. This includes creating or deleting accounts. It also includes modifying access permissions for “movers” when their responsibilities change based on a new position or if they move locations.
- Automated monitoring: The identity management software continuously monitors access and user behavior. If any actions don’t align with security policies or it detects suspicious activity (such as logging in from an unusual location), the system triggers security protocols like multi-factor authentication.
- Role-based access control (RBAC): Role-based access reviews are manual audits that involve verifying that employees only have the access they need to fulfill their responsibilities (following the principle of least privilege). Access reviews are a vital part of lifecycle management because they reduce the risk of over permissioning.
- Deprovisioning: Deprovisioning involves withdrawing an employee’s access from applications and systems. Deprovisioning might include removing access or deleting user accounts when the employee leaves the company or has more access than necessary.
Your identity management system tracks all changes made to active user accounts until they’re deactivated. This helps create audit trails for regulatory compliance and detection of anomalies and security breaches.
Key elements of lifecycle management
Each element of lifecycle management involves making changes to user accounts. They include:
Onboarding and offboarding users
When new users—an employee, contractor, or customer—join your company, your team creates their identity, assigns roles, and grants access to necessary systems, applications, and data as part of the onboarding process.
Similarly, when a user leaves your company or no longer needs access, the offboarding process deactivates their identity. This involves revoking all permissions, access rights, and credentials. This prevents security risks like orphaned accounts (user accounts that are no longer associated with an active user but still exist within the system) that adversaries can exploit to gain unauthorized access.
Job changes
When a user’s role changes because of a promotion, department transfer, or change in responsibilities, teams update their access rights and permissions to reflect their new role. This process ensures people have only the access they need to perform their duties—no more, no less.
Failing to adjust access rights during these transitions can lead to privilege creep, where users accumulate excessive permissions over time. Lifecycle management tools help automate this process, ensuring seamless access modifications, continuous auditing, and compliance.
Access requests and approval workflows
Users may require approval whenever they want to request access to data they currently can’t. For example, they might request access to the company’s project management tool when they’re onboarding or to client data after a change in their responsibilities.
Your lifecycle management processes should include access request and approval workflows that route access requests to appropriate approvers based on company policy who can easily approve or deny them. An automated system might also include the option to add predefined rules to automatically grant access or escalate requests for manual review.
Non-human identity management
Non-human identities include service accounts, applications, APIs, or IoT devices that need access to systems and data. Unlike personal IDs that IT or identity teams manage, NHIs are usually created by software developers–including those who might not have a deep understanding of security.
However, using NHIs can be risky. If people don’t fully understand who or what has access to specific digital resources, they can be compromised and used just as easily as human identities. Some software solutions can automate the creation, updating, and deactivation of non-human identities based on your governance policies and monitor them for unusual activity.
Benefits of an effective identity lifecycle management system
An effective lifecycle management process includes automated systems and software that help organizations gain complete visibility and control of permissions and access.
Automate access and permission management
Automate your access and permission management with lifecycle management software that can enforce role-based access controls, streamline user onboarding and offboarding, and provide comprehensive audit trails. These platforms use predefined rules and policies to grant, modify, and revoke permissions during onboarding, role changes, and offboarding to ensure users always have the right level of access.
This brings consistency in how you manage access across your organization and reduces the risk of over- or under-provisioning since all users are subject to the same processes. Automated provisioning and deprovisioning also minimizes the risk of human error, which can lead to security vulnerabilities and compliance issues.
Stronger security posture
Effective lifecycle management reduces the risk of orphaned accounts and unauthorized access. If you include an immediate deactivation of accounts, you can also lower the risk of malicious actors using dormant accounts.
Automating lifecycle management tasks minimizes the risk of human error, ensuring access rights are always accurate. This reduces the risk of over-permissioned accounts and contains the impact of any attacks that take over the account.
Effective lifecycle management also gives you clear visibility into user access and activities. This allows you to respond more effectively to security incidents by quickly identifying affected accounts and minimizing risks.
Streamlined audits and compliance
An automated lifecycle management system auto-generates detailed logs of access changes, permission adjustments, and account activities.
These audit trails are vital for regulatory compliance and proof that your company follows security protocols. It shows who had access to what and when, allowing auditors to quickly review access control processes.
This information can also be instrumental in complying with regulations like GDPR (for example, Article 5 (1)(f) and Recital 78), HIPAA (45 CFR § 164.312(a)(1)), and SOX (Section 404) more manageable.
Reduced manual work
Automated lifecycle management systems and software reduce the need for IT and HR teams to manually provision accounts, assign roles, and adjust permissions. For example, with Veza Lifecycle Management, users can be automatically provisioned and deprovisioned to ensure they have access to the appropriate set of entitlements across applications based on their role, location, and function in the organization.
All Veza products, such as Access Intelligence, integrate with the System for Cross-Domain Identity Management (SCIM) protocol to further automate the deprovisioning process. This makes it more intelligent and standardized as Veza detects security incidents, usage activity (or lack thereof), or other noteworthy events (i.e. lateral movement, privilege elevation, privilege drift, etc.) that require user deprovisioning to reduce and limit access.
Lifecycle management challenges
Implementing lifecycle management strategies or reengineering lifecycle management processes can come with a few challenges.
App sprawl
App sprawl is the uncontrolled adoption and use of applications within an organization without proper management. It’s difficult to consistently provision, manage, and deprovision access across all systems because each app has its own authentication and access protocols.
There are a couple of ways to mitigate SaaS sprawl. For example, full visibility of permissions and access helps you monitor your SaaS stack and related permissions, which helps limit your sprawling attack surface. Similarly, regular SaaS audits can help identify app redundancy and security risks.
Access debt
Access debt occurs when users accumulate unnecessary permissions over time. Role changes, pending revocation or temporary access, and oversight are common causes of access debt. The greater the access debt, the greater the attack surface, because hackers or other adversaries can exploit excessive permissions to gain unauthorized access to critical systems.
Visualizing and monitoring access permissions can help minimize access debt. You also need clear procedures for managing role changes to ensure access rights are promptly adjusted when users transition to new roles.
Over-permissioned accounts
Over-permission accounts have more access than they require, ultimately violating the principle of least privilege. Causes include misaligned access requests, legacy permissions that weren’t revoked after a role change, and insufficient granular controls within apps.
Over-permissioned accounts are a popular target among attackers because they often have access to sensitive data. However, lifecycle management can keep over-permissioned accounts in check.
For example, identity management software can assign permissions based on predefined roles rather than individual users to standardize access levels. Similarly, automatically provisioning and deprovisioning helps ensure users receive correct permissions when they’re onboarded–and that those permissions are removed properly when their roles change or they leave the organization.
Inappropriate access
Inappropriate access is when users are given access to systems or data they shouldn’t have access to, either by mistake or design. Incorrect role definitions, manual errors, and lack of controls can result in users getting inappropriate access and create major security and compliance risks. If these risks play out, you might have to deal with a security breach, regulatory violation, and misuse of sensitive company data.
Limited visibility
Lack of oversight into who has access to what resources, systems, or data or the inability to track how and when an account is using its permissions can lead to inappropriate access and potential threats going unnoticed.
You can’t monitor, audit, or control access until you have complete visibility over human and non-human identities. More importantly, it’s difficult to prove that access controls are being enforced until they’re clearly audited, leading to compliance-related issues.
Improve your lifecycle management
Effectively lifecycle management is critical to safeguarding your assets and ensuring compliance with regulatory standards. Standardize provisioning and deprovisioning processes, monitor access permissions, and invest in tools that make lifecycle management easier to ensure no threats go undetected.
If you’re looking to bolster your lifecycle management processes, Veza can help. Veza is the Identity Security company, helping organizations secure access across the enterprise, including cloud infrastructure, data systems, SaaS apps, and on-prem apps.
Powered by the Access Graph, Veza’s platform delivers visibility and control of permissions so that organizations can finally achieve least privilege. You get a clear view of who has access to what data and services so only the right people can see or delete sensitive information. It continuously monitors changes in access or permissions and automatically alerts you if something happens that could risk your compliance status. You can configure triggers that prompt Veza to automatically provision new access for joiners, adjust access for movers, and remove access for leavers.
Through Veza Lifecycle Management, organizations can automate:
- Provisioning and deprovisioning processes across typical joiner, mover, and leaver (JML) scenarios
- Removal of access based on a predetermined event, such as a security incident or other indicators of risk
- Continuous monitoring controls that identify unused or over-provisioned access
- Deprovisioning workflows that remove the user from the target application immediately after detection
- Monitoring for unused license entitlements and initiate deprovisioning of those license seats
Schedule your demo to learn more about how Veza can simplify lifecycle management and make the principle of least privilege a reality.
