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12/06/2026 12:06 am
TL;DR: SOX user access reviews remain a control point for publicly traded companies because they support auditability, reduce unauthorized access, and help evidence accountability, according to Zluri. The real issue is that access review cadence, documentation, and remediation discipline determine whether the control exists on paper or in practice.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Zluri: Security & Compliance SOX User Access Reviews for Publicly Traded Companies
By the numbers:
- Zluri says its automated reviews cut down manual work by 70%.
- Zluri says its automated review process is 10 times faster.
- Zluri says it provides over 300 direct integrations with SaaS tools.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should companies run SOX access reviews without drowning in manual work?
A: Use a defined review cadence, named business owners, and automated entitlement collection so reviewers see only the access they need to validate.
Q: Why do access reviews matter for SOX compliance beyond audit paperwork?
A: They prove that access to financially relevant systems is authorised, reviewed, and corrected when it is not.
Q: What do organisations get wrong about access certification?
A: The most common mistake is treating completion as success.
Practitioner guidance
- Tighten reviewer ownership and accountability Assign each application and privilege domain to a named owner who can approve, reject, and remediate findings without passing decisions across teams.
- Require revocation closure before review completion Do not close a certification cycle until denied or out-of-policy access has been removed and the removal is evidenced in the system of record.
- Separate access evidence from entitlement exports Keep the review artifact, the approval decision, and the remediation record together so auditors can reconstruct the control without chasing screenshots or email threads.
What's in the full article
Zluri's full blog post covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- How the certification workflow is scheduled and routed across owners
- How Zluri says automated reviews reduce manual effort and accelerate completion
- How access changes are converted into certification tasks and remediation actions
- How the platform handles integrations across a large SaaS footprint
👉 Read Zluri's analysis of SOX user access reviews for public companies →
SOX access reviews and the governance gap IAM teams miss?
Explore further
12/06/2026 9:08 am
SOX access review is an evidence discipline, not a spreadsheet exercise. The control only matters when organisations can demonstrate review completeness, decision quality, and remediation closure. Zluri's article correctly points to access certification as a compliance mechanism, but the deeper issue is that SOX evidence fails when review artefacts are fragmented across systems. Practitioners should treat the audit trail as part of the control boundary.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 85% of organisations lack full visibility into third-party vendors connected via OAuth apps, according to The State of Non-Human Identity Security.
- Only 1.5 out of 10 organisations are highly confident in their ability to secure NHIs, compared to nearly 1 in 4 for securing human identities, according to The State of Non-Human Identity Security.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who should own SOX access review decisions?
A: Ownership should sit with the business or system owner who understands whether access still matches role need and risk. Security and IAM teams should orchestrate the workflow, but they should not become the final authority on business entitlement decisions unless they are the accountable owner as well.
👉 Read our full editorial: SOX user access reviews expose the limits of manual IAM
