Lani Leuthvilay

January 8, 2025

The Incompleteness in Identity Audits: Why PBAC is the Missing Piece

Traditional identity audits rely on reports of roles and group memberships, giving auditors only a partial view of what a user can do. Auditors often see who has been granted access but cannot assess the broader business context of what those users are actually entitled to access or why their permissions exist. This gap leaves organizations vulnerable to compliance risks and creates challenges in verifying whether access aligns with organizational policies.

Policy-Based Access Control (PBAC) enhances enterprise security by translating business logic into enforceable access policies. It works in harmony with Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) systems, evolving them to provide a more complete view of what users are permitted to see, access, or do. 

For example, assigning a user a role might show they belong to a certain group, but it doesn’t explain what data they can view or what actions they can perform. PBAC addresses this gap by dynamically enforcing policies that reflect real-time identity attributes, contextual factors, and security requirements. This ensures that auditors and compliance teams gain a complete understanding of access decisions, making identity audits more transparent and comprehensive.

Embracing PBAC: What It Means to Centralize Authorization

Centralizing authorization policies is a fundamental component of PBAC and provides a significant step forward in visibility and control. Rather than embedding access control rules within individual applications and services – where they are difficult to monitor and manage – PBAC centralizes these rules in a unified policy engine. This approach further supports auditors and compliance teams by making authorization decisions transparent and manageable from a single control plane responsible for access policies.

By consolidating access policies, identity and auditing teams can:

• Understand and attest with confidence how access is granted across systems.
• Set clear rules on access control that are applicable across applications and business domains.
• Provide a cohesive view of authorization logic that directly links user identity and the context of their access.

How Dynamic Authorization Reduces Risk

One of PBAC’s biggest strengths is its ability to implement dynamic authorization, which grants permissions based on real-time context across enterprise technology layers. This helps eliminate standing privileges, where users have ongoing access rights regardless of current risk or need. With PBAC, access is no longer a “yes or no” based on membership in a role or group but is instead a “yes, if” response determined by identity-aware context, such as the location, time, and risk score.

In practice, this means:

• Enterprises can more effectively enforce policies that comply with Least Privilege Access (LPA) principles, ensuring that users have only the access they need and only for as long as they need it.
• Access decisions can be more granular, focusing only on what the user actually needs, rather than the broader approach of roles. 
• The likelihood of privilege escalation attacks and insider threats is minimized by reducing static access.
• It is also possible for access permissions to be evaluated for every request, so they can be adapted or denied based on the present context of their access.

Impact on Identity Audits and Compliance

The traditional compliance framework revolves around periodic attestation, where access reviews are conducted at intervals to ensure that users retain only the required permissions. However, these reviews are time-consuming, often leading to an “audit-first” mentality, where organizations build systems and processes solely to satisfy auditors.

With PBAC in place, attestation becomes a process driven by business-oriented policies rather than static reports. Compliance teams can quickly demonstrate that access permissions align with security policies and business requirements, reducing the need for manual attestation. Dynamic, policy-driven access controls also enable organizations to more effectively satisfy compliance requirements by showing auditors precisely how and why the access decisions are made.

Bridging Identity Attributes and Authorization

Identity-centric, or identity-aware, security is often considered through two lenses: the identity attributes (roles, groups, entitlements) that define what a user is allowed to do and the authorization policies that apply these definitions to real-world access decisions. Without centralized PBAC, these two elements are disjointed. Identity attributes are defined within IGA systems and Identity Providers (IdPs), while authorization often occurs separately within individual applications or solutions for specific technology patterns (e.g. microservices, API gateways, data layer, etc).

PBAC bridges this gap by ensuring that identity attributes are tightly connected to authorization policies, which in turn govern real-time access. This cohesion enables enterprises to enforce business-specific policies across all applications and resources, integrating identity management with security operations. By treating identity and authorization as two sides of the same coin, organizations gain a comprehensive view of access that is necessary to tighten security and reduce vulnerabilities.

Building Identity Programs That Prioritize Security Over Checkbox Compliance

In a static world, identity programs were primarily designed to pass audits. Systems were built to generate attestation reports, track role assignments, and validate compliance with periodic reviews. However, these programs often fail to protect against attacks, as they lack the agility to respond to shifting risks and emerging threats.

By designing authorization policies to enforce Least Privilege Access and Zero Trust continuously, organizations become better equipped to respond to evolving risks. Instead of merely tracking compliance for the sake of audits, PBAC empowers identity teams to build dynamic defenses that make enterprises more resilient to attack.

Key Takeaway

As enterprises move into increasingly complex and distributed environments, Policy-Based Access Control is no longer optional. PBAC offers a path forward that enables centralized, dynamic authorization, transforming how organizations manage identity and access control. By adopting PBAC, organizations can improve their security posture, simplify identity audits, and ensure that their access control policies are not only compliant but also robust enough to stand against today’s most pressing threats. In short, PBAC is the strategic shift enterprises need to secure digital identities and reduce the risks associated with overprivileged access. 

Watch our webinar to learn how PBAC enables identity teams to attest compliance during audits, or get in touch with our team to learn more about how PBAC can support your enterprise security and auditing.