25.1 Understanding the Process Flow

Before creating or editing review definitions, reviewing the data in the catalog will help determine who needs to be included in the reviews and which items should be reviewed. Some examples of the information a Review Administrator, Customer Administrator, or Global Administrator can look for are:

You can run a review once or multiple times either by starting the review manually or by scheduling it to start at the specified time or interval. Each review is based on a review definition that is based on a specific type of review object and defines all parameters for that particular review. Review Administrators, Customer Administrators, or Global Administrators create review definitions using the provided default review definitions with preselected criteria. These definitions enable you to select what you want to review. For example, you can select review objects such as User profiles, Technical role assigned to users, Accounts and their permissions, or Business roles assigned to users. These review objects are specific to a review type (review template). Each review type provides selection criteria that help Review Administrators to focus their reviews based on varying combinations of identity, application, account, permission, permission assignment, or business role attributes. For example, you can focus the User profiles review by specifying that reviewers should review users with risk greater than 80. Identity Governance provides a default list of attributes for selection when creating review definitions. Review Administrators can request Customer, Global or Data Administrators to add other attributes as selection criteria. Items that do not meet the specified criteria in a review definition are filtered out of the review.

Review definitions also assign reviewers based on their relationship to the review items. Often, administrators use review definitions to split up responsibility for reviewing items to prevent bottlenecks and overloading reviewers. Review definitions can also be referenced in certification policies to enable a comprehensive view of your organization's compliance with specific certification controls such as Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) or Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

In addition to the default selection criteria, Identity Governance provides the ability to enable other attributes including custom attributes as selection criteria. In the attribute definition editor of the catalog, an administrator with Data, Customer, or Global Administrator authorization can specify whether an attribute can be used as a review criteria by selecting an attribute in the Data Administration > Attributes pages and specifying Display in review item selection criteria. For example, in the Identity Attributes page, a Data Administrator can enable Job Code as selection criteria and then a Review Administrator can create a review of users based on Job Code value. In the Permission Assignments page, a Data Administrator can enable Assignment Type and then a Review Administrator can create a review of permissions based on assignment type.

In addition to preselected options for specifying review items and additional options based on your review type, you can modify the preselected options and expand or restrict items being reviewed in a User Access Review, an Account Review, or an Account Access Review. The following table provides a few examples of available options and special conditions if any.

Identity Governance enables administrators to specify self-review policy when creating review definition based on the following review types:

When specifying the self-review policy, you can choose to:

When defining a review, you assign users and roles to perform the review. Depending on the type of review, you can specify any or more than one of the following options as reviewers.

For more information about owners of applications and permissions, see Section 12.2, Understanding Identity, Application, and Permission Management. For more information about coverage maps, see Using Coverage Maps.

For additional verification or approvals, you might specify more than one reviewer stage. If you specify more than one stage for reviews, the reviewer assignment workflow will vary based on the specified stages. For more information about multistage reviews, see Section 25.1.17, Understanding Multistage Reviews.

To ensure a timely review process, you can also specify an Escalation Reviewer. Escalation Reviewer resolves all review tasks that are not completed on time. You can specify users, groups, and business roles as Escalation Reviewers. If you do not specify an Escalation Reviewer, the Review Owner is the default Escalation Reviewer. Escalated review items also appear in the Exceptions stage. If Identity Governance detects any escalations at the start of a review, all of the review items appear in the Exceptions stage.

For more information about authorizations including Escalation Reviewer, see Section 2.1.2, Runtime Authorizations.

Review definitions contain an expiration policy. Review Administrators and owners specify the actions that Identity Governance takes when a review expires without being completed:

For Identity Governance 2.0 and later, review definitions have the default expiration policy set to complete the review. For review definitions migrated from earlier versions of Identity Governance, review definitions have the default expiration policy set to terminate the review and discard any decisions.

Email notifications let reviewers, escalation reviewers, owners, and others know when a review is at various stages of a review run. The Notifications area of a review definition allows you to set up several standard notifications to go to whomever you specify during the various phases of a review. Standard notifications include Review start, Review end, Reviewer task past due, and Review completion. Review the details of the email notification and update it as needed.

You can click an email name to view who will receive the email, why they will receive it, when they will receive it, and how often they will receive it. You can either accept the default settings or change the settings and add other recipients based on relationships. You can view the name of the email source, preview the email, and email the notification to a specified email address. If you change the default settings, we recommend that you also change the description of the notification. For example, if you change who receives the notification, change the recipient name in the description.

Regarding notifications received by escalation reviewers, when a review item is escalated, Identity Governance sends the reminder notification to the escalation reviewer as it would to any other next reviewer. By default, the escalation reviewer will not receive the Reviewer task past due notifications as these are typically emailed to the reviewer and reviewer’s supervisor when overdue tasks remain in the reviewer queue. However, you can add an escalation reviewer as a recipient in the CC field if needed.

In addition to changing the settings when defining a review, you can also remove a default notification, customize the template of a default notification, and add new notifications by selecting an email template provided by Identity Governance. For information about customizing the templates, see Section 4.4, Customizing Email Notification Templates. For information about disabling email notifications such as notification when a running review is terminated or notification when permissions are revoked, see Disabling Review Email Notifications.

Identity Governance calculates a schedule based on a specified start time, time interval, the time of the day, and the time zone. You can specify the time interval to be hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly. For all schedules, the time end date is adjusted automatically based on the Java add calendar method. For weekly and monthly schedules, the next review is determined based on the specified day of the week or day of the month. The following table provides a few examples of weekly and monthly schedules.

Administrators can start a review run, or review instance, in preview mode or live mode. In preview mode, administrators can:

Administrators can modify the attributes of a review definition at any time, including the Review Owner. If there is a running review instance at the time, that running review instance is not affected by changes to the definition. Identity Governance creates a new version of the definition with the changes and only future runs started since the modified definition will reflect the change.

If you have a review currently running, modifying the review definition does not change the attributes of the current review. The running review always points to the version of the review definition that you used to start the review.

If you assign a new owner to a running review instance, both the previous and new owners can access that specific instance of the review. The previous owner continues to see review runs from before the ownership change and future review runs. The new owner sees only that review run. You can also change the review end date and time for a running review.

When a review run or review instance is live, the server generates review items based on the criteria. Assigned reviewers look at the review item details, decide what action to take on each review item and submit their decisions. If allowed, by the review definition, reviewers might reassign items to a different reviewer instead of making a decision.

In a review with multiple reviewers for each review item, Identity Governance shows decisions made when the first reviewer submits actions for any of the review items. When any reviewer has submitted a decision for a review item, the other reviewers cannot take any action on that item unless the reviewer has authorization as an administrator. Review items with no actions remain in each reviewer’s list until someone submits actions for them.

In a review with multiple stages, reviewers must act on review items in the order that the stages are defined in the review definition. For more information about multistage reviews, see Section 25.1.17, Understanding Multistage Reviews.

While reviewing items the reviewers have the option to see the assignment details such as, if the assignment was direct or inherited, assignment start and end time, assignment value and risk. If the permission collector is an AD or an eDirectory collector, then during collection, they must enable the option Populate Nested Permission Assignments to collect these details.

Time-based assignment information such as removal or expiration of permissions, technical roles, or business role with assignment can also be viewed while reviewing items. Reviewers and review owners of user and account access review, account reviews with account permissions, and business role membership reviews can review the assignment details and decide to keep or remove the assignments before the scheduled time. If they remove any assignment, and the review item is approved, Identity Governance removes the time-based assignment from the pending requests list. Review items with a clock icon next to it indicates that it has time-based assignment information.

Identity Governance enables you to download all or a filtered list of review items assigned to you as reviewers. In addition, Review Administrators and owners can download list of all reviewers, a list of review items in a specific reviewer’s queue, and a list of all review items. You can download these lists as a CSV file for manual review and comparison.

The list of reviewers includes rows for each reviewer by queue type. For example, if a reviewer is a supervisor and also an exception reviewer, you will see two rows for the user in the downloaded file. When review items are assigned to multiple reviewers, for example when a reviewer is a group, you will see a row for each reviewer with the same number of review items. In all the scenarios, each row will include columns of all the user attributes that were enabled to display in the quick info view in the Data Administration > User menu including custom attributes.

The list of review items you download from the Review Items tab will always include all review items. Except for User Profile Review, all other review item lists will include final decisions made on the review items. User Profile Review will include only the original values of the selected attributes.

The list of review items you download from the Your Review Items tab includes rows for review items assigned to the reviewer with columns that you, as an administrator, included in the Configuration > Review Display Customization menu. You can filter the review items and download only the items you want to review manually.

All downloaded files will be saved to a download folder. You can then click the Download icon on the application title bar to access the saved file and download the file to your local machine.

When you initiate a review run, Identity Governance generates tasks for the assigned Reviewers. The Reviewers are responsible for reviewing a set of users and deciding whether the current user access should be maintained or revoked, or, in some cases, modified. Identity Governance can send reminders to the Reviewer or escalate the review items to the Escalation Reviewer, if one was specified in the Review Definition, or to the Review Owner who is the default Escalation Reviewer. Also, review items in the exception queue (unmapped accounts) are automatically assigned to the Escalation Reviewer if an escalation reviewer was specified for that review. In a multistage review, Identity Governance forwards the task to the next reviewer before it finally moves the tasks to the Escalation Reviewer or Review Owner queue.

Reviews that contain reviewers specified by a coverage map can result in an escalation if no matches could be found from the coverage map. For more information about reviewers, see Section 25.1.7, Specifying Reviewers. For more information about managing Reviewers, see Section 28.2.4, Managing the Progress of Reviewers. For more information about performing a review, see Section 29.1, Performing a Review.

Identity Governance provides escalation options to help Review Owners and Administrators ensure that the review process proceeds in a timely manner. You can set one or more escalation reviewers, and a timeout value to instruct Identity Governance to escalate the process and move pending review items to escalation reviewer queues. If a review definition does not set escalation reviewers, the review owner is the default escalation reviewer and in a multistage review, review items will be escalated to the next reviewer in the queue.

If you specify more than one reviewer stage, the reviewers must complete the review in the assigned order. For example, you might want the permission holders to verify that they continue to need the assigned permission, then the individual’s supervisor can approve that ongoing need. As a final step, the permission owners can review the assigned permission. In this case, you would specify Self review, Supervisor, then Permission owners as the reviewers. Each stage shows as a separate group of review items to the review owner. When you select Self Review, users can review their access for that stage only, unless the Review Options are set to Allow self review in all stages.

If you specify more than one reviewer (such as a set of users or groups), each reviewer shares the responsibility for submitting a decision within a single reviewer stage. For example, you might want the permission holders to verify that they continue to need the assigned permission, then you want a group of users called Super group to approve the ongoing need. In this case, you would specify Self review then Review by Selected Users: Super group as the reviewers.

You can also specify that a stage is skipped if the prior stage decision is Keep or Remove. By default, you cannot specify the same reviewer in consequent stages.

At any point during a review run, Identity Governance might not be able to resolve a reviewer. For example, if you specify Permission owners as one of the reviewers and no permission owner is actually specified in the catalog, Identity Governance cannot resolve the reviewer to an identity. When this happens, the review item is escalated to the Escalation Reviewer, if one exists, or to the Review Owner, and this reviewer must complete the remaining review tasks for the item. In this situation, the review owner sees an exception section with the review items with the unresolved review items.

Secondary reviewers in a multi-stage review can confirm the previous decision or they can override the decision. For Technical Role and Business Role Definition review they can make additional changes to the review definition or undo or discard the changes.

Aside from letting the expiration policy complete the review run, a review run concludes in one of several ways:

After reviewers have made decisions and submitted all review items, the Review Owner approves or terminates the review run and Identity Governance moves the review run details to a list of completed reviews.

A Review Owner has the option to complete an in-progress review even if reviewers have not submitted decisions for all review items. When a Review Owner completes a review, Identity Governance takes the following actions:

A Review Owner also has the option to terminate an in-progress review. When a Review Owner terminates a review, Identity Governance takes the following actions:

The source of the identities, permissions, accounts, and roles under review drives how review-related request changes are fulfilled. The fulfillment process can be manual tasks, automated actions in Identity Manager, actions sent to help desk services, or actions initiated by workflows in Identity Manager. The fulfillment process begins when a review run completes or when a Review Owner or Administrator modifies or removes a review item, it generates a change request which are then sent to fulfillment for approval. Each review item generates separate change request. However, for Business Role Authorization Review, the review items are consolidated into a single change request, which is then forwarded to fulfillment.

Note that, for Global Authorization Assignment review types, Identity Governance fulfills the change requests through its internal process and does not initiate a separate request.

Identity Governance, however, does not generate change requests for review items for entities, such as a role, permission, account, or user if they are deleted before approval. In such cases, Identity Governance marks the deleted entities with a strike-through line across the text and also provides the reason for not generating the fulfillment request under View Fulfillment Status.

For Technical Role Definitions review, when you generate a fulfillment request due to attribute change or permission revocation, Identity Governance automatically fulfills those requests on approval. But there are scenarios when Identity Governance sends requests for manual fulfillment. Following are those scenarios:

Sometimes multiple changes per review items are split between automatic and manual fulfillment. In such scenarios, Identity Governance fulfills some changes automatically and sends the remaining for manual fulfillment.

If you are a Global Administrator, you can set the global property com.netiq.iac.fulfillment.techrole.manualonly to true to send all requests for manual fulfillment.

There are scenarios when Identity Governance forwards request items for manual fulfillment. For example, when the fulfillment target is Active Directory, and there is a request to remove an inherited permission from a user. When a user is assigned a permission to a group because they are a member of that group, it is a direct assignment. However, there are times, when a user is assigned permission to a group even when they are not a direct member. This happens when the groups are embedded. In such scenarios, the user inherits the permission and Identity Governance fails to automatically fulfill the request since the user is not part of the group. To collect these permission assignments, you must enable the option Populate Nested Permission Assignments while configuring the Identity Governance AD Permission and eDir Permission collector templates.

Review Owners and Administrators can view the fulfillment status of review items automatically fulfilled and verified by internal processes as soon as a review run is partially or fully approved.

For more information about fulfillment, see Section 15.1, Understanding the Fulfillment Process.

Some review definitions require a Review Auditor to certify the results of the review run. Review Auditors are individuals who have read-only access to a review run. They cannot modify or delete decisions. They can:

Usually, Identity Governance sends an email notification to the Review Auditor when a review run is waiting for acceptance. The Review Auditor can then log in and can review all details and Accept or Reject the review. The Review Auditor must enter comments when rejecting a review.

A Customer, Global, Review, or Data Administrator creates certification policies and sets remediation action for violations. Identity Governance calculates violations and after initial setup automatically triggers remediation action. Remediation actions include email notifications, change requests, or micro certification.

For more information about micro certification and certification policies, see Section 25.2, Understanding Micro Certification and Section 30.0, Creating and Managing Certification Policies.