How User Access Reviews Help Adhere To SOX Compliance

‍The Sarbanes-Oxley Act, also widely referred to as SOX. It is a regulatory standard that aims to safeguard investors against fraudulent financial reporting by corporations. 

However, meeting this compliance can be challenging without an appropriate solution. But by opting for a solution that offers user access review functionality can help adhere to this compliance standard. In this article, we’ll learn how user access review helps meet SoX compliance seamlessly.

Ensuring compliance holds the utmost importance for most organizations. Other than safeguarding an organization's valuable data, adhering to compliance helps protect against potential fines/penalties, legal actions, and the mishandling of data. However, the cost of not complying with regulations can be substantial, depending on the industry and organization size.

But the ultimate question arises is where should one possibly start in order to meet compliance? Well, to begin, your team needs to understand the key aspects involved in managing access rights in accordance to SOX; this way, it will become much easier for them to adhere to SOX compliance. 

So, managing access rights under SOX includes the following: 

• Monitoring access rights during the onboarding of new employees, as existing employees transition to new roles, and when their tenure comes to an end, and they depart from the organization.
• Enforcing Segregation of Duties (SoD) protocols to prevent conflicts of interest.
• Establishing and maintaining an access control matrix to clearly define authorization levels.
• Conducting regular access audits to ensure compliance and security.

Now, your team just needs to keep these points as their primary focus, which will significantly streamline the process of achieving the SOX compliance standard. So, let's proceed further and dive into detail on how to effectively meet SOX compliance.

How Is SOX Compliance Met?

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“How is SOX Compliance Met?

• Monitoring
• Logging
• Auditing”

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Though adhering to SOX compliance can be a little difficult, but your team can streamline the process of meeting these regulatory standards by emphasizing on monitoring, logging, and auditing the following areas: Internal controls, network activity, database activity, login activity (both successful and failed attempts), account activity, user activity, information access. 

In short, all of these aspects revolve around user access within organizations. This access holds pivotal significance, not only for compliance but for data security as well. 

A single mismanaged access point can create a gap for unauthorized users or hackers to infiltrate a considerably larger system filled with highly-valued assets and data. As outlined above, neglecting to manage, control, monitor, and audit access could expose an organization to compliance penalties and a major security breach.

Now that you know your team needs to emphasize on user access, let's see how an automated IGA's user access review functionality helps your team control, manage, and govern user access.   

How Does User Access Review Helps Achieve SOX Compliance?

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“Role of User Access Review In Achieving SOX Compliance”

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User access reviews play a pivotal role in addressing the visibility gaps that organizations may encounter concerning their user access landscape. With an automated IGA solution, your team can conduct user access reviews and gain complete insights into who is accessing what, what level of access they have, and whether they have valid reasons for access rights. 

This is a very crucial step to perform because if your team is not aware of who is able to access what, they will further face difficulty in setting proper access policies and enforcing access control. 

Furthermore, when it comes to meeting SOX compliance, user access reviews fulfill the crucial functions of monitoring, auditing, and logging access activities. As per Zluri’s whitepaper “the state of access review”, organizations conduct access review to comply with regulations like SOX.

Also, from a cybersecurity point of view, such reviews act as a proactive measure to prevent potential breaches. 

Such as conducting user access reviews helps mitigate insider threats, including instances of privilege abuse, access creep, or gaps in termination procedures. Moreover, they highlight anomalies that might indicate unauthorized user/bad actor movement within a system. 

Apart from that, user access reviews also function as a safety net, ensuring that the access controls an organization has put in place are operating effectively. However, to effectively manage user access, your team also needs to implement certain user access review strategies, so let's find out what these strategies are.   

Best User Access Review Practices For Ensuring SOX Compliance

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UAR Best Practices for Ensuring SOX Compliance

1. Create UAR Policies

2. Implement RBAC and Least Privilege Access Principle

3. Grant Temporary Access

4. SoD to Avoid Conflict of Interest

5. Have a Single Source of Trust

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To effectively adhere to SOX compliance standards, your team needs to follow these user access reviews best practices:

1. Create User Access Review Policies

Creating user access review policies involves a structured set of guidelines and procedures that your team follows to effectively monitor user access rights. By implementing these policies, your team can gather precise and up-to-date information about individuals who are accessing various resources within your organization's systems, networks, data, and applications. 

Also, by enforcing user access policies, your team can ensure appropriate access levels that different users should possess, aligned with their specific job roles and responsibilities.

For instance, a junior accountant might need access to basic financial records for data entry, while a senior financial analyst would require access to more complex financial models and reports. 

By adhering to the user access review policy, the IT team can ensure that the junior accountant doesn't have access to sensitive financial data beyond their job scope and that the senior financial analyst has the necessary access to perform their tasks effectively. 

2. Implement Role-Based Access Controls And Least Privilege Access Principle

Your team can enforce role-based access controls and the least privilege access principle to effectively mitigate the risks associated with breaches, access creep, and other potential insider threats. This approach strategically minimizes the likelihood of any single user being given excessive privileged access.

For example, by implementing RBAC, your team can assign users to specific roles, granting them access according to their job functions to reduce the chances of unauthorized users accessing sensitive SaaS app data. And the least privilege principle ensures users have only the minimum access required, to avoid over-provisioning or granting excessive access permissions. 

3. Grant Temporary (For a Specific Time Period) Access

• your team can implement the practice of granting your employees temporary access to SaaS apps, systems, and data. So, instead of providing permanent access, your team can assign temporary access, ensuring that access is granted solely on a necessity basis pertaining to a specific function, task, or predefined time frame. 
• Also, your team needs to make sure that the access rights are promptly revoked after the completion of the specific task to mitigate potential security risks. 
• For instance, a marketing team is working on a new product launch. They require access to specific marketing analytics software for a limited time to analyze how the product is performing. 
• By practicing assigning temporary access, your team can grant them access exclusively for the duration of the campaign analysis. Once the analysis is complete and the access rights can be promptly revoked by your team, minimize security breaches. 

4.  Segregate Duties To Avoid Conflict Of Interest

• To ensure the accurate provisioning and deprovisioning of access privileges, it's crucial to involve relevant teams with distinct responsibilities. For example, there are two critical tasks involved in reviewing user access rights: granting access permissions and evaluating the changes in access permissions.
• By assigning two separate reviewers—one responsible for granting access permissions and another for evaluating the changes in access permissions, by doing so your team can create a system of checks and balances. 
• This segregation ensures that no single individual has the authority to both grant and review access, reducing the potential for bias or manipulation. 

5. Have A Single Source Of Trust

Establishing a centralized, trustworthy source for access review data is pivotal. By bringing down all the user access-related data to a single location, your team can easily determine who is accountable for what and also, with the help of centralized data reviewers, efficiently review user access. This further helps in building zero trust across the organization. 

For instance, large organizations have multiple departments, users, and systems, which makes it quite challenging for IT teams to gather user access data. 

But with an automated IGA solution, your team can gain all the user access-related data in a centralized dashboard, and reviewers can effortlessly identify which users have access to specific resources and who is responsible for granting or revoking such access. This comprehensive view enhances the accuracy of access reviews and ensures that user permissions align with their roles and responsibilities.

Now that you are familiar with the user access review strategies, it's time you shift your attention towards considering opting for a modern IGA solution. Because manually managing and governing user access reviews can be challenging to carry out for IT teams, particularly in large companies. 

Although there exists a range of IGA solutions that can automate this process, but one that stands out from the rest is - Zuri. What is Zluri? How does it help your organization to stay compliant with regulatory standards? Here's a quick read-through. 

How Zluri Access Review Helps Stay Compliant With Evolving Regulatory Standards?

Is your team facing challenges to effectively meet SOX compliance requirements? If yes, you no longer have to worry, as Zluri’s automated access review emerges as a solution to mitigate this concern. 

Zluri’s access review is designed to simplify your team's complex task of adhering to SOX compliance. With its wide range of exclusive features, such as automated access certification, auto-remediation, activity and alerts capabilities, and more, your team ensures that your organization meets the stringent requirements set forth by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. 

With Zluri, your team can automate the entire access review process, get 10 x better results than manual methods, and save your team's efforts by 70%. Now, let's move ahead and see how it works.

Now, let’s take Sentry as an example to see how you can automate access review in Zluri.

To help you gain more clarity on how Zluri access review works, let's take an example, an IT admin has permission to "grant, revoke, and modify access" and also has permission to "review the user access." While this might seem efficient in a way, but there is a high chance of manipulation during the decision-making process and the occurrence of conflict of interest. Such situations can jeopardize data security and compliance to an extent that you couldn't even imagine.  

So what Zluri access review does to prevent such a situation is, it implements segregation of duty (SoD) policy. With this policy in place, your team can prohibit a single user from holding both "assigning, modifying, and revoking access" and "reviewing access" roles simultaneously. This prohibition eliminates the possibility of a conflict of interest, where an individual could manipulate decisions, posing a risk to data security. 

Furthermore, whenever an attempt is made to assign conflicting roles to a single user, Zluri's automated system generates alerts and notifications to your team. This enables them to take immediate action to resolve the conflict and ensure compliance with SOX requirements.

This example was to just showcase how Zluri's innovative capabilities help your team maintain effective control over access and adhere to critical regulations like SOX. However, there is more to it.

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Also Read: PCI DSS Compliance Checklist for 2023