Step Four in the FINOSEC user access review best practice series is to ensure users who have access to your systems have legitimate duties that justify not only access but their specific permissions for those systems.

Step Three in the FINOSEC user access review best practices series is to rate and prioritize the system risks you identified as the most important systems in Step Two of the UAR Best Practices and align those with the access permissions required.

We learned about the importance of a System Map in Step One: Building the Foundation, last week.

This week, we are discussing Step 2 – Start with the Most Important. In this critical step in the user access review process, you will identify the most important systems by identifying the high-risk activities each system performs.

Let’s acknowledge a few things at the start.

1. User access reviews (UAR) are important, and increasingly so.

2. Examiners expect you to complete them regularly.

3. They’re a crucial element of your overall cybersecurity program.

4. They’re complicated and they take time.

Do you believe the full title? Or do you believe the parenthetic comments are a better descriptor? Here’s a simple and universal truth of the human condition: we tend to avoid tasks we think will be hard. Or complicated. Or time consuming. Or all three!

Financial institutions have long viewed user access reviews as a double edged sword. On one hand, regulators require them. They’re a crucial component in managing to least privilege. But they’re a challenge to conduct on a regular schedule. And if you have to rely on legacy technology and outdated manual processes, the frustrations can compound logarithmically.

But you don’t need to be stuck in the past. Help is on the way.

User access reviews are important. They also tend to be a complex, time-consuming task. When you add the regulatory and cybersecurity insurance expectations about these reviews and how often they really should be completed, it gets worse. Finally, to complete the picture, you may have to rely on legacy systems or tedious manual processes. It all adds up to one big “ouch.”

Alpharetta, GA (November 8, 2022) - Finosec announced that the user access reporting process no longer needs to be labor intensive or complicated, thanks to their User Access Reporting solution. The Finosec solution operates smoothly in tandem with financial institutions and supports more than 100 financial systems and has reviewed more than 11 million user permissions.

User Access

There are likely a high number of systems in place at your institution. Running a successful financial institution relies heavily on tools and technologies that will improve the efficiencies of you and your team.

The practice of user access reporting within financial institutions has historically been an arduous process that relies on archaic technology and is both time and labor intensive. While generating multiple user access reports per year would be ideal, many financial institutions, through no fault of their own, often find they can only produce the bare minimum amount of reporting required annually. But as cyber risks continue to grow and the regulatory requirements continue to increase, it is vital that financial institutions can quickly and easily produce these reports, and with increased frequency.