EmpowerID’s Unique ‘Top Down’ Approach to Role Mining Provides the Missing Link That Efficient Enterprise Organizations Crave

Compliant Access by design is the capability to map out the following in advance:

• Position appropriate access for employees, partners, and customers.
• The risk policies that will measure and ensure continued compliance.

Unfortunately, defining position appropriate access for a large organization can be a huge and daunting task.
It can also lead to unavoidable project delays. However, not having such guidelines forces IT organizations to resort to costly and inefficient manual processes which often create security vulnerabilities.
EmpowerID’s Role Mining engine solves this challenge by intelligently scanning your organization and then recommending an optimal initial set of roles.
This initial set is based on the combination of your organization’s existing HR job position data as well as existing access assignments.
These initial roles then evolve as your business environment changes, e.g. with reorganizations, mergers and acquisitions, role changes, etc.
All the while, EmpowerID’s role optimization functionality manages all aspects of role management ensuring they always adhere to Zero Trust and only ever grant optimal least privilege access.

After years of analyzing organizations’ security models and sources of data, EmpowerID invented the “Top Down Analytical” Role Mining technique.
Compliant Access requires that user entitlements are appropriate for their position
Top Down Analytical Role Mining facilitates this by leveraging 3 areas:

1. The rough outline of an organization’s existing business roles.
2. The knowledge about which users occupy those positions.
3. Their whereabouts in the company, i.e. their department, location, etc.

Primarily, “Top Down Analytics” optimizes access based on what a user does within the organization.
For organizations with HR systems, the only maintained source for employee position information is that HR system itself.
Like any invaluable data source, it needs updating as users change jobs, locations, and roles.
The Top Down Analytical Process
First, EmpowerID takes a snapshot of this data to determine roles and rolebased access policies.
Next, EmpowerID inventories all the entitlements and access assignments for each user in every system (not just in your HR system).
Following which, EmpowerID then uses a sophisticated analytical technique to optimally fit existing user access assignments on the business role and location tree.
Fourth, once the optimal matches are identified, they can be published as role-based assignments automated by your HR data.
Finally, EmpowerID then maintain changes on an on-going basis.

Role Mining and Optimization assists organizations by minimizing the number of security roles, reducing administrative workloads, and streamlining audit recertification campaigns.
Without role optimization, your managers are faced with the daunting task of certifying hundreds of individual technical entitlements per direct report.
A role optimization program can reduce the number of direct assignments by 80% and present managers with a compact list of business-friendly roles to certify.
More importantly, your organization’s security becomes more manageable and your risk profile is minimized.

For organizations working with consultants and role modeling tools, EmpowerID’s Role Modeling Inbox allows anyone to integrate their external roles and access management.
It does this by providing a set of inboxes into which roles and access changes can be published.
EmpowerID then uses configurable rules to determine if these upstream decisions are automatically actioned or need to go through workflow approval processes first.