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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for IAM Access Certification Operations Analyst

💰 $ - $

identity-managementiamsecuritycomplianceaccess-governance

🎯 Role Definition

The IAM Access Certification Operations Analyst is a specialized Identity and Access Management (IAM) role responsible for executing, managing, and improving the access certification lifecycle across enterprise systems. This operational analyst ensures periodic access reviews, drives remediation and revocation workflows, supports audit and compliance (SOX/ITGC), optimizes identity governance tooling (SailPoint, Saviynt, OIM, etc.), and partners with business owners and IT teams to maintain least-privilege access. Ideal candidates combine hands-on tooling experience, governance process knowledge, strong stakeholder communication, and a focus on continuous process improvement.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Junior IAM Analyst / Access Management Technician
  • IT Audit or IT Compliance Analyst (SOX/ITGC exposure)
  • Helpdesk / Active Directory Administrator with access management responsibilities

Advancement To:

  • Senior IAM Access Certification Analyst / IAM Specialist
  • Identity Governance & Administration (IGA) Lead or Manager
  • Access Governance Manager / IT Compliance Manager

Lateral Moves:

  • Privileged Access Management (PAM) Analyst
  • IT Risk & Compliance Analyst
  • ServiceNow / ITSM Administrator with IAM focus

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Lead and coordinate quarterly and ad-hoc access certification campaigns across applications, platforms and directories, ensuring reviewers receive timely notifications, complete attestations, and that certifications meet internal SLAs and audit requirements.
  • Manage the end-to-end access certification process in identity governance tools (e.g., SailPoint IdentityIQ, SailPoint IdentityNow, Saviynt, Oracle Identity Manager), including campaign setup, entitlement aggregation, reviewer assignments, escalations, and campaign closure.
  • Execute entitlement reconciliation and certification rule tuning to reduce false positives and optimize reviewer scopes, including entitlement attribute normalization and grouping to simplify reviewer decisions.
  • Drive remediation activities by validating and processing access revocations, temporary access removals, and role changes through identity governance tooling and downstream access provisioning systems, coordinating with application owners and access request teams.
  • Monitor certification campaign health using dashboards and metrics (completion rates, overdue items, remediation velocity) and proactively engage stakeholders to meet certification targets and minimize control exceptions.
  • Serve as the operational owner for certification-related integrations with HR systems, Active Directory, Azure AD, cloud IAM (AWS IAM, Azure AD), and ITSM tools (ServiceNow), troubleshooting synchronization and provisioning failures.
  • Support and maintain certification workflows, approval chains, and escalation policies; implement changes to workflows to simplify reviewer experience and improve completion rates while preserving segregation of duties (SoD) and compliance controls.
  • Prepare and maintain detailed documentation and runbooks for certification operations, including process maps, playbooks for exception handling, and step-by-step guides for common remediation scenarios.
  • Support internal and external audits (SOX, SOC, PCI, regulatory) by producing certification evidence, audit-ready reports, remediation logs, and responding to audit walkthroughs related to access reviews and governance controls.
  • Perform entitlement and role analysis to identify orphaned accounts, excessive privileges, and stale access; recommend and implement entitlement cleanup campaigns and role recertification initiatives.
  • Collaborate with application owners and business unit managers to define reviewer rosters, certify appropriate owners, and deliver reviewer training and communications to increase accountability and certification accuracy.
  • Validate, triage, and resolve certification-related incidents and service requests raised via ITSM (ServiceNow), owning tickets end-to-end and escalating to engineering teams when tool defects are identified.
  • Create and automate periodic reporting for stakeholders and compliance teams: certification completion dashboards, remediation KPIs, open exceptions, and trends analysis to inform risk decisions and continuous improvement.
  • Conduct periodic governance checks to ensure access certifications map to documented roles, job functions, and role-based access control (RBAC) models; recommend role redesigns to reduce entitlement sprawl.
  • Implement and test certification process changes and tool upgrades, coordinating with IAM engineering to perform regression testing, UAT, and phased rollouts that minimize operational disruption.
  • Analyze certification campaign metrics and reviewer behavior to design targeted interventions (training, business process changes, improved entitlement grouping) that increase certification efficiency and effectiveness.
  • Enforce segregation of duties (SoD) and compliance policy controls during certifications by flagging SoD violations, raising remediation requests, and working with risk and audit teams to resolve conflicts.
  • Participate in cross-functional change control committees and IAM governance boards to represent certification operations, provide impact analysis for changes, and ensure compliance with corporate access policies.
  • Maintain and improve certification-related APIs, connectors and data feeds by working with integration teams to ensure reliable entitlement data and reviewer mappings for accurate certifications.
  • Support privileged access and sensitive permission certification cycles (critical systems, financial applications, admin roles) with additional validation checks, enhanced reviewer communications, and accelerated remediation processes.
  • Provide hands-on mentorship and training to junior certification analysts, establishing best practices for campaign management, audit evidence collection, and stakeholder engagement.
  • Identify automation opportunities across certification tasks (reminder cadence, ticket creation, report generation) and partner with RPA/IAM engineering to reduce manual effort and increase auditability.

Secondary Functions

  • Assist the IAM team with periodic access request and access provisioning incident escalations when certifications reveal systemic issues.
  • Support ad-hoc entitlement analyses and reports requested by risk, audit, or business leaders to clarify certification outcomes or investigate anomalies.
  • Participate in IAM project initiatives such as role-based access model rollouts, identity lifecycle improvements, and GRC tool implementations by providing operational insights and testing certification functionality.
  • Document lessons learned from certification cycles and propose roadmap items to improve tooling, policies, and cross-team handoffs.
  • Contribute to cross-training documentation for business unit reviewers to ensure consistent and accurate attestation decisions.
  • Collaborate with data protection, privacy, and security teams to ensure certification outcomes align with data access policies and least-privilege requirements.
  • Support periodic emergency access reviews and post-incident access re-certifications following security incidents or major organizational changes.
  • Help maintain an internal knowledge base of entitlement definitions, owner contacts, and known exceptions to accelerate reviewer decisions and reduce inquiry volume.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Deep operational experience with identity governance and administration (IGA) tools such as SailPoint IdentityIQ/IdentityNow, Saviynt, Oracle Identity Manager (OIM), IBM Security Identity Governance, or similar platforms.
  • Proven ability to design, configure, and manage access certification campaigns, reviewer mappings, entitlement grouping, and escalation workflows within an IGA solution.
  • Strong working knowledge of access provisioning and lifecycle integrations: Active Directory, Azure AD, LDAP, SCIM, HR feeds (Workday), and cloud IAM (AWS IAM roles/policies, Azure AD roles).
  • Hands-on experience integrating IGA tools with ITSM platforms (ServiceNow, Jira Service Management), including automated ticket creation for remediation and incident tracking.
  • Familiarity with compliance frameworks and audit controls: SOX/ITGC, SOC, PCI, GDPR, and ability to prepare certification evidence for auditors.
  • Experience analyzing entitlements, building role models, and conducting entitlement cleanup or role recertification initiatives.
  • Proficient with reporting and analytics: building certification dashboards, KPI reporting (completion rates, overdue items), and extracting audit-ready evidence from IGA systems.
  • Basic scripting or query skills (PowerShell, SQL, Python) to triage connector errors, extract entitlement data, and support automation tasks.
  • Understanding of segregation of duties (SoD) tools and policies, including ability to identify SoD conflicts and coordinate remediation.
  • Familiarity with privileged access management concepts and controls, and experience supporting privileged access certifications.
  • Experience with identity lifecycle processes, joiner/mover/leaver logic, and how these impact certification campaigns.
  • Knowledge of identity data modeling and attribute normalization to ensure accurate entitlement aggregation and reviewer assignment.
  • Experience with user access review automation and exception management processes to reduce manual review overhead.

Soft Skills

  • Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills; comfortable driving decisions with business owners, application managers, and auditors.
  • Strong attention to detail and a methodical approach to audit evidence collection and documentation.
  • Problem-solving mindset with demonstrated ability to troubleshoot integration, workflow, and data issues in production environments.
  • Organizational skills and the ability to manage multiple certification campaigns and priorities concurrently under tight deadlines.
  • Collaborative team player who partners effectively with IAM engineers, application owners, ITSM teams, and audit/risk stakeholders.
  • Customer service orientation with the ability to coach and educate non-technical reviewers to improve attestation accuracy.
  • Adaptability and continuous improvement mindset to refine certification processes and adopt new automation opportunities.
  • Analytical thinking and comfort working with quantitative metrics to drive operational improvements.
  • Project coordination skills to support UAT, change management, and deployment of certification-related enhancements.
  • Integrity and discretion when handling privileged or sensitive access information.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Cybersecurity, Information Systems, Business Administration, or related field; or equivalent work experience in IAM/IT compliance.

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Cybersecurity, Information Systems, Computer Science, or Risk and Compliance.
  • Relevant certifications (preferred): Certified Identity and Access Manager (CIAM), Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA), CompTIA Security+, SailPoint or Saviynt certification.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Cybersecurity / Information Security
  • Information Systems / Computer Science
  • Business Administration with IT focus
  • Risk Management / Auditing

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 2–5 years in Identity and Access Management, IT access governance, or IT audit roles with hands-on access certification responsibilities.

Preferred: 4–7+ years experience operating IGA tools and delivering access certification programs in medium to large enterprise environments, with exposure to SOX/ITGC controls and audit processes.

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