Role-Based Access Control: Some Best Practices

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) is an aspect of identity and access management whereby resource access is granted to users based on their role in organizations. Implemented properly, it can help organizations ensure data security and adhere to data privacy guidelines. Listed here are some RBAC best practices.

1. Build an RBAC Strategy

Creating a plan starts with an evaluation of where you are (data, method, policy, systems), determines your ideal future state (automated RBAC-enabled access provisioning for a collection of apps and systems), and identifies the critical gaps that need to be addressed (data quality, process problems, various system-to-system authentication/authorization models). Identifying the challenges upfront makes it easier to fix them head-on before the implementation starts.

2. Establish a Framework for Governance

Organizations preparing for RBAC need to make decisions on project goals, set expectations, manage and support implementation, set performance metrics, and manage risk. To identify data and process problems and prioritize remediation efforts, the governance board should link up with the HR function. 

3. Assign a User Lifecycle Owner

When HR goals do not fit with the priorities of IT, organizations will find themselves at loggerheads. When these misalignments arise, decisions that are in the best interests of the company as a whole need to be taken by a person (or individuals) who can serve as an escalation point. Note that both the HR and RBAC governance boards should have the participation of the User Lifecycle Owner. 

4. Role Management

Determine who will own the technical roles and the business roles (e.g., application owner). An established set of protocols and policies needs to be in place about how positions are re-evaluated, whether and when they expire, and who retains them. 

5. Start with a Top-Down Role Analysis

Discussions with business managers should be conducted during the RBAC design process in advance of building technical roles in order to record the functional access of staff and verify that each user in the position has the same core access. At this point, it is important to clean up any unnecessary exceptions that will allow the role mining tool to scrutinize access to identify candidate roles. 

6. Perform a Bottom-Up Role Analysis

Via role mining and analysis, technical roles are established and are a "bottom-up" operation, meaning that the tool collects and analyses existing data to decide the technical roles for a group of users.

Technical Roles are sets of permissions that enable business value to be provided by the implementation of a specific business feature. The best results ultimately come from working with business stakeholders to design a collection of business roles and then reconciling them with the access scenario exposed by role mining in order to understand what access has been missed or is not needed.

7. Get Started With a Pilot 

In order to reduce implementation risk, produce a quick win, and demonstrate the efficacy of the RBAC model, we suggest choosing a small department or business feature as a beta project. 

Conclusion

Business roles reflect the organization's business activities or work profiles, and they are not unique to one IT structure but are an enterprise-wide concept. One or more business roles are allocated to a worker, and these business roles are, in turn, connected to technical roles that represent all of the IT systems required by that specific job function. Organizations must hold their focus at the enterprise level and look at the larger picture in order to understand the potential of the RBAC system.