Access reviews are essential to enforcing Zero Trust, but manual processes can drain resources and introduce risk. Learn how automation streamlines entitlement management, improves compliance, and reduces IT overhead.
Access reviews are a fundamental part of enforcing Zero Trust, yet many organizations struggle with the complexity, time commitment, and human error involved in managing them manually. These reviews are critical in identifying unnecessary or outdated access rights, helping teams combat privilege creep, maintain compliance, and reduce security risk. However, traditional approaches often fall short due to outdated systems, lack of visibility, and resource constraints.
In this blog, we’ll explore how automated access reviews can help enforce the principle of least privilege, reduce risk, and align with Zero Trust architecture, without overwhelming your IT team.
Why Access Reviews Are Core to Zero Trust
In a Zero Trust model, no user or system is inherently trusted. Every identity and access point must be continuously verified. This means regular entitlements and access reviews are not just best practices—they’re mission-critical.
However, many enterprises are operating with fragmented legacy systems, siloed applications, and minimal insight into who has access to what. As a result, access reviews are either skipped, rushed, or conducted ineffectively.
The result? Users often retain access long after changing roles or leaving the organization. This leads to privilege creep, where permissions accumulate over time and increase the attack surface for cybercriminals.
The Challenges of Manual Entitlement Reviews
Manually reviewing user entitlements is a slow, error-prone, and often incomplete process. Most organizations rely on spreadsheets or fragmented tools that provide little context around access rights or business justification.
These inefficiencies stem from:
- Poor visibility into systems and applications
- High reviewer fatigue
- Lack of process ownership outside of IT
- Inability to scale with growing teams or complex infrastructure
Over time, these gaps create compliance risks and delay the ability to respond to security incidents.
Start Small: Run a Pilot and Establish Ownership
Implementing access review automation doesn’t have to be a massive lift from day one. Start by running a pilot program in a department with well-understood access patterns. This allows your team to assess fit, iron out reviewer workflows, and build confidence in the process before rolling out organization-wide.
Key elements to consider in your pilot include:
- How reviewers are selected and notified
- The cadence and scope of reviews
- Integration with existing identity and access management (IAM) tools
- The ability to meet compliance or audit requirements
It’s also important to socialize the change. Moving decisions away from IT and toward business unit owners may introduce cultural friction. Make sure reviewers understand the importance of their role in security and are supported with user-friendly tools and training.
Automate the Review Process
Modern identity governance tools offer robust automation for access reviews. These tools centralize visibility and allow organizations to schedule, assign, and monitor access reviews based on policy-defined risk levels or user roles.
Automation can help:
- Trigger reviews when users change roles
- Delegate ownership to business managers
- Send reminders and escalate overdue tasks
- Produce audit-ready reports
- Identify unused or excessive entitlements
By integrating these tools with existing systems like CRM, ERP, and cloud platforms, you can ensure reviews happen consistently and accurately, without overburdening IT.
Automate Entitlements to Reduce Risk
Entitlement management is often treated as a one-time configuration rather than a dynamic, ongoing process. But as your workforce evolves, so do their access needs.
Automating entitlement assignment and recertification allows you to:
- Reduce manual provisioning errors
- Prevent privilege creep
- Enforce the principle of least privilege
- Offer tiered or subscription-based access models
- Improve user experience and operational agility
Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) plays an essential part here. With RBAC, administrators define access levels by job function, streamlining how permissions are granted and ensuring access stays aligned with business needs.
De-Provisioning: The Forgotten Risk
While much attention is paid to onboarding users, offboarding is equally (if not more) critical. When an employee changes roles or leaves the organization, lingering accounts become a prime target for attackers.
Automating de-provisioning ensures that access is revoked immediately upon status changes, reducing the risk of “zombie” accounts. This not only strengthens your Zero Trust posture but also:
- Lightens IT workload
- Improves response times
- Prevents compliance violations
- Enhances consistency across environments
When tied into your HR or identity systems, automated de-provisioning ensures that no task is left incomplete during transitions.
Strategic Benefits of Automating Access Reviews
Implementing automated access reviews and entitlement governance delivers measurable results across multiple dimensions:
| Benefit | Impact |
|---|---|
| Stronger security | Tighter access controls, fewer orphaned accounts |
| Audit readiness | Always-on visibility and compliance documentation |
| Operational efficiency | Fewer manual tasks, faster provisioning and de-provisioning |
| Scalability | Supports growing environments and dynamic teams |
| Business ownership | Shifts responsibility to those who understand actual access needs |
With the right automation strategy, organizations can reduce risk, improve compliance, and support Zero Trust– all while lightening the load on their IT teams.
Ready to Automate Your Access Reviews?
Gain full control of your access landscape.
eGroup can help you implement an automated access review process tailored to your environment, supporting your Zero Trust journey and freeing your team to focus on higher-value work.
