Access Reviews That Actually Reduce Risk
Why Most Reviews Are Theater and a Few Quietly Save You From Incidents
Access reviews are one of the most misunderstood controls in identity security. On paper, they look perfect. Periodic checks. Manager approvals. Auditor-friendly screenshots. In reality, most access reviews reduce paperwork, not risk.
Senior engineers learn quickly that access reviews don’t fail because the tooling is bad. They fail because they are designed to make everyone feel safe instead of making hard decisions unavoidable.
The first problem is intent. Many access reviews exist to satisfy compliance language, not to change access. When reviewers are implicitly expected to approve everything, the outcome is predetermined. Risk is not reduced. It is documented.
Effective access reviews begin with a different question. Not “Should this person keep access?” but “What breaks if we remove it?” That framing changes behavior immediately. When access removal is the default, approvals must be justified instead of assumed.
Ownership is the next critical factor. Access reviews assigned to people who don’t understand the system are guaranteed to fail. Managers approve because they don’t want to disrupt work. Application owners approve because they fear outages. Nobody rejects because nobody feels responsible for the risk. A review without a clear risk owner is just a form.
Reviews that reduce risk are owned by people who understand both the business impact and the security impact. That usually means application owners with real accountability or identity teams empowered to enforce outcomes. Without that authority, reviews become polite suggestions.
Scope matters more than frequency. Reviewing everything at once overwhelms reviewers and guarantees rubber-stamping. Reviewing the most sensitive access more often produces real results. Privileged roles, service principals, external users, and high-impact applications deserve focused attention. Low-risk access can wait.
Another common failure is reviewing identities instead of access paths. Saying “this user still needs access” is vague. Saying “this user needs this role for this reason” forces clarity. Risk hides in ambiguity. Good access reviews eliminate it.
Context is what turns a review into a decision. Reviewers need to see last sign-in, usage patterns, role impact, and ownership information. Without context, approval becomes a guess. With context, removal becomes reasonable. Entra ID provides much of this data, but it only helps if it’s surfaced intentionally.
Service accounts and application identities are where access reviews quietly fail most often. Humans review human access. Non-human identities accumulate permissions indefinitely. Effective access reviews include service principals, managed identities, and app permissions because attackers prefer identities that never log in interactively.
Timing also matters. Reviews scheduled arbitrarily are ignored. Reviews tied to lifecycle events are effective. Role assignments reviewed shortly after elevation. Guest access reviewed after project milestones. Privileged access reviewed after inactivity. Reviews aligned to reality produce better outcomes than calendar-based ones.
Automation helps, but only when paired with enforcement. Auto-removal of unreviewed access creates urgency. Auto-approval creates complacency. The safest default is removal when no decision is made. Silence should not equal trust.
The most important shift is cultural. Teams must accept that access removal is not punishment. It is hygiene. Removing unused access reduces blast radius, audit exposure, and incident impact. Mature organizations celebrate access cleanup instead of fearing it.
Access reviews that reduce risk are uncomfortable at first. People ask questions. Things break occasionally. That discomfort is temporary. The risk reduction is permanent.
The goal of access reviews is not to prove you looked.
It’s to prove you acted.
When access reviews consistently result in removal, reduction, or justification, they work. When they consistently result in approval, they don’t.
Good access reviews don’t make audits easier.
They make breaches harder.
And that’s the only outcome that actually matters.