Access review workflows in Netwrix Identity Manager 7.0

At a glance

What this is: This on-demand webinar covers Netwrix Identity Manager 7.0 improvements for certification campaigns, including multi-reviewer assignments, clearer workflows, and better decision tracking.

Why it matters: It matters because access reviews are a core control for human IAM and non-human identity governance, and workflow friction often determines whether certifications are completed on time and with usable evidence.

👉 Watch Netwrix's on-demand webinar on Identity Manager 7.0 certification workflow updates

Context

Access review campaigns often fail in practice because reviewers are asked to decide too much, too late, with too little context. For IAM teams, the issue is not whether certification exists, but whether the workflow produces timely, traceable decisions that can stand up to audit.

This webinar is about the operational side of Identity Governance and Administration, not a new security theory. Netwrix is presenting a workflow update that aims to reduce bottlenecks, improve decision visibility, and make certification cycles easier to run across distributed teams.

Key questions

Q: How should IAM teams reduce bottlenecks in access review campaigns?

A: IAM teams should distribute certification workload across multiple reviewers when campaigns regularly stall, but they must keep final ownership and escalation rules explicit. The goal is to shorten approval queues without making accountability ambiguous. If reviewer assignment is unclear, faster completion can still produce weak governance evidence.

Q: What makes an access review process defensible in an audit?

A: A defensible access review process produces clear evidence of who reviewed each item, what decision was made, and what remediation followed. Auditors need a campaign record, not just a completion percentage. If decision history is fragmented across tools or messages, the governance trail is harder to prove.

Q: Why do certification campaigns slow down in large organisations?

A: Certification campaigns slow down when the workflow asks too much of individual reviewers and the interface makes decisions hard to complete quickly. Reviewers delay when they cannot easily understand status, action, or ownership. That creates a control risk because access remains in place while the campaign waits.

Q: How can organisations improve access review quality without adding friction?

A: Organisations can improve access review quality by simplifying reviewer instructions, reducing ambiguous statuses, and checking that the process works in the languages used by approvers. The best campaigns are easy to complete and easy to evidence. If reviewers need IAM support to interpret the workflow, the design needs work.

Background and context

Certification campaign bottlenecks in identity governance

Certification campaigns become slow when a single reviewer is responsible for too many items, or when the interface makes it difficult to see what action is required. In IGA, that creates a governance failure, not just a usability issue, because delayed decisions reduce the value of the review and can leave access in place longer than intended. Multi-reviewer assignment is one way to distribute decision load, but the real technical issue is orchestration of accountability, status, and traceability across the campaign lifecycle.

Practical implication: map reviewer capacity to campaign volume so access reviews do not accumulate unresolved items.

Decision tracking and workflow clarity in recertification

Decision tracking matters because certification is only defensible if each decision can be traced back to a reviewer, a rationale, and a completion state. Clear action indicators reduce ambiguity in the workflow, while stronger decision history helps auditors and IAM leaders verify that campaigns were completed consistently. This is especially important in environments with recurring recertification, where evidence quality often matters as much as the access decision itself.

Practical implication: require campaign evidence that shows who decided, when they decided, and what action followed.

Language support and adoption in access review programmes

Expanded native language support is an operational governance feature because review quality depends on whether business reviewers can understand the task without translation friction. In distributed organisations, language gaps can delay completion, increase misclassification, and push work back to technical teams. That makes language support part of workflow design, not just a convenience layer. The underlying issue is whether the certification process is accessible enough for the people actually accountable for the access decisions.

Practical implication: validate access review workflows in the languages used by business approvers before scaling campaigns globally.

NHI Mgmt Group analysis

Access review quality is a workflow problem before it is a policy problem. Certification campaigns usually fail because the programme cannot sustain reviewer throughput, decision clarity, and traceability at the same time. When those three elements are weak, the organisation may still be doing reviews, but it is not reliably governing access. Practitioners should treat campaign design as an operational control surface, not an administrative afterthought.

Multi-reviewer certification is a signal that governance teams are trying to absorb human bottlenecks without changing the accountability model. Distributing review items can help completion rates, but it also raises the need for clear escalation rules and decision ownership. Otherwise, the process becomes easier to execute while remaining hard to defend. The practical question is whether reviewer distribution improves governance or merely hides overload.

Expanded workflow visibility is now a baseline expectation for IGA programmes. If decision history is difficult to follow, the certification exercise cannot prove that access was reviewed consistently or that remediation occurred. That matters for audit, for internal control, and for the credibility of periodic access reviews. Teams should measure whether their campaign records are understandable to both operators and auditors.

Identity governance tools are being judged less on policy coverage and more on campaign usability. Reviewers are often business users, not IAM specialists, so the process has to reduce ambiguity rather than add another control layer. This post points to a broader market direction where governance success depends on whether access review work can be completed accurately by the people assigned to it. Practitioners should re-evaluate whether their certification flow is built for execution at scale.

From our research:

• 85% of organisations lack full visibility into third-party vendors connected via OAuth apps, according to the State of Non-Human Identity Security.
• Lack of credential rotation is cited as the top cause of NHI-related attacks by 45% of organisations, according to the State of Non-Human Identity Security.
• For teams rebuilding review and lifecycle workflows, the NHI Lifecycle Management Guide is the next resource to align certification with provisioning, rotation, and offboarding.

What this signals

Certification workflow design is becoming a governance differentiator. As identity programmes mature, the question is no longer whether access reviews exist, but whether they can be completed, evidenced, and audited without operational drag. Teams should expect review tooling to be judged on throughput, traceability, and reviewer usability, not just policy coverage.

Access review programmes now need to account for distributed approver populations. When business reviewers work across regions and languages, campaign design becomes part of governance quality. The practical signal for IAM leaders is that multilingual UX, clear action indicators, and campaign evidence are no longer optional extras if certification is to scale.

For practitioners

• Separate reviewer load from reviewer ownership Assign multiple reviewers where campaign volume regularly exceeds what a single approver can realistically complete, but preserve a clear owner for final accountability. Review speed should improve without turning certification into a shared-noise exercise.
• Track decision evidence inside the campaign record Require each access review item to retain reviewer identity, decision state, and remediation outcome so audit evidence is assembled as the workflow runs. Avoid relying on email threads or external notes to prove completion.
• Test certification usability with business approvers Run access review pilot campaigns with the actual reviewer population, especially in distributed teams, and check whether action indicators and status labels are understood without IAM team intervention.
• Validate multilingual review workflows before rollout Confirm that certification instructions, reviewer prompts, and campaign status messages work in the languages used by approvers, not only by the IAM team that configured the process.

Key takeaways

• Netwrix Identity Manager 7.0 is aimed at reducing certification campaign friction by improving reviewer assignment, workflow clarity, and decision tracking.
• The governance issue is not whether access reviews exist, but whether the process produces timely decisions and audit-ready evidence.
• IAM teams should treat certification usability as a control design problem and validate workflows with real approvers before broader rollout.

Key terms

• Certification Campaign: A certification campaign is a structured access review process in which assigned reviewers confirm, revoke, or justify entitlements for a defined set of identities. In practice, its value depends on completion quality, decision traceability, and whether remediation follows the review outcome.
• Decision Tracking: Decision tracking is the ability to record who made each access review decision, when it was made, and what happened next. It turns certification from a checkbox exercise into evidence that can support audit, governance oversight, and remediation accountability.
• Reviewer Bottleneck: A reviewer bottleneck occurs when too few approvers are responsible for too many certification items, causing delays or incomplete decisions. In identity governance, bottlenecks weaken the control because access can remain active while the campaign stalls.
• Access Review Evidence: Access review evidence is the record that proves a certification campaign was completed as intended, including reviewer identity, decision outcome, and any downstream remediation. Strong evidence is understandable without side channels and can survive audit scrutiny.

Deepen your knowledge

NHI governance, agentic AI identity, and machine identity security are core topics in our NHI Foundation Level course, the industry's only accredited NHI security programme. If you are responsible for identity security strategy or NHI governance in your organisation, it is worth exploring.

This post draws on content published by Netwrix: What's new in Netwrix Identity Manager 7.0. Read the original.