Over time, most employees and some contractors move from job to job. As employee responsibilities change, so do their required access to systems and applications.

Users can be counted on to request and acquire privileges they need to do their job. Unfortunately, they cannot be relied on to ask for no-longer-needed privileges to be removed. Most users:

• don't understand the technical details of privileges.
• prefer to retain privileges, in case they are needed again.

Reliable privilege acquisition combined with unreliable privilege removal mean that users tend to accumulate unneeded privileges over time. This creates security exposure, as no-longer-needed privileges may be abused.

• Access Certifier is an effective tool to periodically review the access rights held by each user and to flag inappropriate access rights for termination.
• Access Certifier invites managers, application owners and data owners to review privileges within their domain of responsibility and either accept or reject each one.
• Whereas users can be counted on to request new privileges, Access Certifier can be counted on to request that old privileges be re-examined.

Access Certifier acts as a counter-balance to reliable privilege acquisition business processes by periodically inviting responsible parties to review current privileges and request removal of those which are no longer needed.