Entitlement Management

Modern IT infrastructures empower their users and thereby introduce new risks. With a few clicks a single user can subvert a business-critical process and cause considerable financial loss.

Governance, Risk and Compliance Management (GRC) programs used to implement efficient and effective control frameworks are therefore becoming an increasingly important focus area for IT and business managers alike.

However, GRC initiatives tend to be reactive, striving to optimize the existing monitoring, surveillance and auditing capabilities of an organization. Streamlining and merging control frameworks from different compliance regimes is one common approach. Nonetheless, even if the GRC overhead becomes more efficiently managed, it keeps growing.

To achieve a sustainable solution to this problem we need to attack the root cause. Risk-intelligence must be built into our IT-infrastructures.

This is where Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) and Entitlement Management play an important role by providing:

• A standardized way to translate regulatory requirements into access control policies
• Automated and distributed real-time enforcement of policies at every entry point
• Enterprise-wide and consistent policy modelling from a central point
• Context-aware policy interpretation to adapt to dynamically changing conditions
• Centralized auditing capabilities to answer questions such as "who can do what?" and "who has done what?"

Entitlement Management with ABAC thereby offers real-time enforcement of access control policies which implement regulatory compliance and risk mitigation plans as a component of normal day-to-day processing. It enables a shift from reactive surveillance to proactive enforcement which in turn reduces the GRC overhead and improves control efficiency.