Access violation management and SoD controls: what teams need to know

TL;DR: Forrester’s Total Economic Impact study reports 96% ROI, $875K in net value over three years, and a 13-month payback for Pathlock’s Access Violation Management, driven by automation of segregation-of-duties reviews, reduced audit effort, and continuous risk monitoring. The underlying governance lesson is that manual SoD models break under access sprawl and recurring review load.

NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Pathlock: The Total Economic Impact™ of Pathlock AVM Solution

By the numbers:

• The report says the solution reached payback in 13 months.

Questions worth separating out

Q: How should security teams implement segregation of duties monitoring at scale?

A: Teams should move from periodic review to continuous detection of conflicting access combinations across the applications that matter most.

Q: Why do manual SoD reviews become unreliable in modern IAM programmes?

A: Manual reviews struggle because access changes faster than review cycles and the number of entitlement combinations grows faster than human teams can reconcile them.

Q: What do security teams get wrong about access violation management?

A: They often treat it as an audit afterthought rather than an operational control.

Practitioner guidance

• Automate toxic combination detection Identify conflicting role and entitlement combinations in core business applications, then evaluate them continuously instead of relying on scheduled reviews.
• Centralise entitlement evidence Keep violation history, approvals, and remediation records in one control plane so audit teams can trace decisions without assembling manual proof packs.
• Prioritise exception ageing Track how long each SoD exception remains active and require explicit revalidation before the business justification expires.

What's in the full report

Pathlock's full report covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:

• Forrester’s full cost model and benefit assumptions behind the 96% ROI figure
• The three-year breakdown of audit, compliance, and manual review savings
• The implementation assumptions used to calculate payback and net present value
• The specific operational scenarios that drove the quantified benefit estimate

👉 Read Pathlock's analyst report on access violation management and SoD automation →

Access violation management and SoD controls: what teams need to know?

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