Is role mining the same as data analysis?

No, role mining is a specific form of data analysis that focuses on processing role and position data from HR systems and authorization data from IT systems. This allows you to develop a basic set of business rules for role-based authorization.

Is role mining mandatory?

No, role mining is not mandatory, but it is an important tool for efficiently creating an initial set of business rules when implementing Role-Based Access Control.

What is the difference between role mining and Role-Based Access Control?

With Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), access rights are granted and managed based on a person's role(s) within an organization. For this, you need an authorization matrix in HelloID business rules that lists all roles and their corresponding access rights. Role mining is a data analysis process that distills this from existing IT and HR systems.

What are the steps in role mining?

After inventorying all user roles in the HR system and all authorizations used in the IT systems, you must analyze, clean, and match the data. Based on that, you develop an initial blueprint for role-based authorization that you can then iteratively expand and refine.

Can you also use role mining for ABAC?

With Attribute-Based Access Control, you can use more attributes than only a user's role to determine access rights. HelloID uses business rules, which enable ABAC. ABAC is therefore an extension of RBAC, but this means role mining remains a useful tool for developing your rights structure.

Role Mining

What is Role Mining?

With role mining, you can iteratively map all relevant user roles and their access rights. The input from a role mining project provides the necessary data for implementing Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) in an organization. We explain our role mining approach in the article below.

Why Role Mining?

With a role-based authorization mechanism, you issue accounts and access rights based on someone's department, position, or role in the organization. If you work in the finance department, for example, you have a standard Outlook and Office account plus access to the financial systems. Say you move to a new role within the sales team? Your finance access rights are automatically revoked, and you receive access to the CRM system and the related customer data instead.

Access Based on Roles

This ensures that everyone, based on their role, has the access rights required for that role, the so-called "birthright access." Because this happens automatically, you prevent users from accumulating unnecessary excessive rights. This not only makes access management more efficient, but it also improves your information security and compliance.

The starting point is a structured overview that records all roles in your organization, and for each role, lists the required applications and access rights. How you implement and manage such a role structure and associated rights depends on the Identity and Access Management (IAM) platform you use. Sometimes an authorization matrix is implemented for this purpose; within HelloID, we use business rules. With business rules, you can, for example, specify that a person with the role of finance employee always receives access to the financial system.

An important advantage of business rules over standard RBAC is that we are not limited to roles. You can use other characteristics, called attributes, and process rules to determine a person's access rights. For example, you can include a rule that activates new employees exactly one day before onboarding. Business rules, therefore, provide more flexibility and capabilities. In fact, with HelloID, you are using ABAC (Attribute-Based Access Control).

Role Mining to Compose Business Rules

But how can you compose business rules? You can, of course, start a complete business analysis from scratch. In it, you map all job functions and processes, including the applications and data required for them. The problem is that this results in a complex and lengthy project.

It is much more accessible to start with a role mining analysis. With role mining, you reuse as much existing knowledge as possible. After all, even before you apply role-based authorization, you already have to issue accounts and access rights to your users. Even then, you already try to take a person's role and activities into account as much as possible. By now, collecting all accounts, access rights, and group settings for existing users in your IT systems and properly analyzing this data, you can quickly create an initial version of your business rules. You can then gradually refine this initial set of rules. With such a pragmatic role mining approach, you avoid a lengthy, complex business analysis.

How Does the Role Mining Process Work?

For this iterative role-mining process, Tools4ever uses its own role-mining scan tool. With our customers, we follow these steps:

Inventory of Existing Roles: We collect all roles registered for employees in the HR system.
Inventory of Existing Rights and/or Groups: We identify authorizations and user groups from IT sources, such as Entra ID or Active Directory.
Role-Based Authorization Design: We match the information from the previous two steps, analyze it, distill patterns, and create an initial draft of roles and associated rights.
Concept Evaluation: With stakeholders such as department managers, we look for inaccuracies. We also look for data pollution, for example, the accumulation of legacy rights. We use this to adjust the draft.
Initial Baseline for a Role-Based Authorization Model: This baseline can be used operationally and expanded, refined, and updated as new insights emerge.

The role mining process is iterative, practical, and collaborative. It begins with an analysis of existing users and their current access rights across the IT environment. Using our role mining scan and working closely with your team, we identify relevant roles and their associated permissions, which are then configured as business rules within the HelloID environment.

Types of Role Mining: Bottom-Up and Top-Down

You will sometimes encounter the terms "bottom-up" and "top-down" role mining. These are two different approaches:

Top-Down Role Mining: In modern HR systems, in addition to personal information, employees' department(s), position(s), and/or role(s) are recorded. This provides a source of all roles used in an organization.
Bottom-Up Role Mining: You can collect access rights, users, and user groups from existing applications and IT systems, such as Active Directory or Entra ID.

What is distinctive about the Tools4ever role mining approach is that we combine these approaches optimally. The top-down and bottom-up analyses together form steps 1 and 2 of the Tools4ever role mining process described in the previous section. By analyzing and matching the top-down and bottom-up data, you can quickly and effectively develop an initial role-rights model and further refine it.

Can I Manage All Access Rights Based on Roles?

Role mining is a tool for implementing role-based authorization. At the same time, role-based authorization has its limitations. For well-defined roles, such as an administrator, you can usually manage access rights easily based on a person's role. We also refer to these as key roles. There are also roles for which this alone is not sufficient. We provide two examples:

For less tightly defined roles, such as a project manager or IT developer, the required rights usually depend on their specific project(s). Their role alone is then insufficient. For one assignment, someone may need a Visio account, while on another project, someone must use MS Project.
Even for well-defined roles, there are exceptions. Many people have additional tasks beyond their standard work or temporarily participate in a project. Or they are also active as an emergency response officer or works council member. All of these situations sometimes require extra access rights.

If you tried to capture all those exceptions in a role-based model, you would progressively define an ever-growing number of roles. Instead of a single administrator role, you would end up with multiple variants. Or users would be assigned additional roles for various side tasks. As soon as you realize, during your role mining analysis, that you are defining roles that apply to only one or a few users, we miss the mark.

Service Automation for Optional Access Rights

This means that, in addition to a role-based approach, you also need a solution to issue and manage optional access rights, the exceptions. HelloID provides a Service Automation Module for this purpose. With it, you can set up a self-service portal where employees or their managers can request applications or access rights. With HelloID, you can also easily add online approval steps for the request by the responsible manager(s). You can also automatically limit the validity period of such access rights to prevent unnecessary rights accumulation.

Effective account and access rights management, therefore, requires seamless collaboration between Role-Based Access Control, augmented by role mining, and service automation for all optional access rights.

5 Role Mining Tips

There are several considerations for a role mining project:

Role mining is primarily about avoiding a theoretical analysis. From the first employee onward, an organization has started issuing accounts and access rights. Use that knowledge and experience to create your first blueprint with roles and rights as simply as possible.
Work top-down and bottom-up. The goal is to align the knowledge of employees and their formal roles, as recorded in HR systems, with the access rights granted in your IT environment.
In role mining, your data is almost always polluted. Until RBAC is implemented, rights management is typically semi-manual. As a result, many users have gradually accumulated excessive access rights, and errors have also been made. Cleaning up data is therefore an important part of role mining.
Data mining is an iterative process. You create a concept based on your data. You then review, discuss, and improve that concept. This allows you to expand, refine, and update your role-based model over time. It is also wise to repeat your role mining regularly, for example, semiannually. Not to remake the design, but to identify deltas and errors.
Not everything can be captured in a role-based model; optional rights remain necessary. With an IAM solution like HelloID, you can integrate role-based authorization seamlessly with your broader account management processes.

Role Mining Best Practices and More Information

With role mining, we combine HR data and data from IT systems to develop and implement an initial structure with roles and rights quickly and efficiently. We use our HelloID role mining tools for this. After the technical extraction of the data, analysis, verification, and consultation are needed to develop an initial baseline. Points of attention include removing existing errors, pollution, and unnecessary accumulation of access rights. Tools4ever business consultants have extensive experience with this and will assist you with a clear, well-defined consulting engagement. In this role mining webinar, you will be introduced to this method, which has already been applied to numerous customers to quickly create a baseline set of business rules.

[1] Vanaf nu gebruik we vooral de term ‘rol’, maar in de praktijk kan het ook over functies en afdelingen gaan.