How to Improve Security With Fine-Grained Governance

How access governance platforms can increase the effectiveness of Segregation of Duties audits ⬇️ ➡️ Comprehensive visibility and analysis: Fine-grained visibility into user access rights, roles, and permissions across an organization's systems and applications. This lets you easily analyze and map out the access landscape, identifying potential Segregation of Duties conflicts. ➡️ Automated fine-grained access reviews: Automate the access review process, allowing you to schedule regular reviews of user access rights based on predefined rules and policies. Automated reviews ensure up-to-date access privileges, reducing the risk of unauthorized access and potential conflicts. ➡️ Real-time monitoring and alerts: Real-time monitoring capabilities, flagging any potential Segregation of Duties violations or suspicious activities as they occur. This enables prompt identification and resolution of conflicts, minimizing the risk of fraud and security breaches. ➡️ Identification of compensating controls: Identify and assess compensating controls that mitigate the risks associated with specific Segregation of Duties conflicts. It ensures that these controls are effective and continuously monitored for sustained compliance. ➡️ Policy-based access control: Best-of-breed access governance platforms enable you to implement policy-based access controls, ensuring that users are assigned only the necessary access rights for their job responsibilities. Applying the principle of least privilege reduces the likelihood of potential Segregation of Duties conflicts. ➡️ Detailed reporting and auditing: Generate comprehensive reports and audit trails, providing detailed insights into Segregation of Duties audit results. These reports facilitate clear communication with stakeholders and auditors, demonstrating compliance and control measures. ➡️ Integration with identity and access management systems: Seamlessly integrate with IAM / IDM systems, ensuring smooth access management and synchronization of user access rights across the organization. ➡️ Continuous monitoring and improvement: Proactively address any emerging Segregation of Duties issues by continuously monitoring access rights and conducting regular reviews. It allows you to refine access control policies over time, improving the effectiveness of Segregation of Duties audits.

Aspiring for "Bulletproof" AI security is creating an AI Security Doom Loop instead What's happening? Every week, I see a common pattern: business teams avoid involving security when implementing AI use cases. The irony? This is often because security teams are trying too hard to deliver value... by requiring too many controls. Security teams (myself included) instinctively add more controls to feel safer: more approvals, more documentation, more checkboxes. But this System 1 thinking creates an unintended consequence—teams simply bypass us altogether. What's reactance? The psychological term for this is reactance. When people feel their autonomy is threatened, they resist. In AI governance, this shows up as shadow AI: teams using AI tools without any oversight rather than navigating our "comprehensive" approval process. The critical question isn't whether our 47-step AI governance framework is thorough—it's whether teams will actually use it. More controls (vs. the right controls) inadvertently create an AI security doom loop. How can we eschew reactance? Six strategies that can help break out of the AI security doom loop: 1. Co-assess risk → Partner with business teams to identify what risks really matter for their specific AI use case, not what theoretically could go wrong. 2. Make controls risk-proportional → A ChatGPT brainstorming session doesn't need the same controls as an AI handling customer PII. 3. Offer choices, not mandates → "Here are three approved approaches" instead of "You must do exactly this." 4. Build speed lanes → Fast-track approvals for lower-risk AI use cases while maintaining rigor where it counts. Bonus: commit to SLAs 5. Listen and iterate → Regular feedback sessions to adjust controls based on real-world friction, not theoretical concerns. The goal isn't perfect security—it's effective security that teams will actually follow. Sometimes fewer controls that everyone uses beats comprehensive controls that no one follows. What's your experience with AI governance? Are your teams coming to you for help, or finding workarounds?

“The good feeling you get after cleaning up over-privileged accounts lasts 10 minutes.” I talked with 600 security and IT practitioners over the past 2 years. Here’s what I learned: 1) Security, DevOps and IT teams are tasked with managing an uncontrollable amount of identities, apps, roles and entitlements. 2) Employees will tell you when they are under-privileged, but not when they are over. 3) To clean up over-privileged accounts, companies use periodical access reviews. Often used for satisfying compliance standards rather than security, retrospective reviews can result in giving users unauthorized access for months on end. 4) With 80% of last year’s cyber attacks being credential-related, no one can afford that risk exposure. 5) Reactive tools like access reviews and threat detection are important but in high-volume, noisy environments, they have a limited ability to keep privileges from sprawling. 6) To enable real-time least privilege, we must bridge the gap between security who create the policy, IT / DevOps who enforce it, and employees who are the subject of the policy. 7) For teams looking to tackle this, the focus should be on enabling employees to self-serve access, and to use risk-based approval flows that follow pre-defined security policies. Strive to automate the de/provisioning of access to enable short-lived and fine-grained permissions, needed for achieving least privilege access. And then, when you streamline the day-to-day operation of access request - evaluation - provisioning - revocation, good governance follows. Thoughts? Write them in the comments.