Access spreads over time. People change roles, projects end, and vendors come and go, but access often stays behind. That leftover access is where many internal breaches begin, and it is one of the first things an examiner checks. A regular UAR keeps access aligned with roles, reduces risk, and produces the evidence your examination requires.
Most financial institutions run a full UAR quarterly or twice a year, and run more frequent reviews for privileged, service, vendor, and administrative accounts. The right cadence depends on your risk profile and your examiners’ expectations.
A user access review confirms that a person should have access to a system at all. An entitlement review goes deeper and confirms that the specific permissions inside that system are appropriate for the person’s role. A strong program does both. See the glossary for related terms.
A spreadsheet review is out of date the moment you export it, cannot prove that a flagged item was actually fixed, and consumes days of staff time each cycle. See the full comparison in spreadsheets vs. Provision.
Provision runs scheduled, scoped reviews, routes each item to the right reviewer, and turns every approve or deny decision into a task that is closed with proof. Reporting runs on a complete data set, so your evidence is ready before the examiner asks. This is the core of the Insight tier, covered in depth on the user access reviews solution page.
See how a UAR runs end to end in Provision, scoped, decided, and exported audit-ready.